Fairstein, Edward

ORAL HISTORY OF EDWARD FAIRSTEIN
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
November 13, 2002
[Editor’s note: recording begins with interview in progress.]
[Tape 1, Side A]
Mr. Fairstein: – [They said, “We can’t tell you anything] about it [a job in Oak Ridge], but if you’re willing to go down there, you will be allowed to leave about six weeks before graduation, and you’ll still get your degree, and you won’t have to take your exams or anything like that.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Fairstein: So that was wonderful to me, because I had been thoroughly fed up with New York. There was an hour subway ride every day each way to go to college and come back, and people were so – particularly on the subways – were so impolite and all that. I just wanted to get away from New York.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, big city life.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, exactly. So I came down, and there were two or three others who came down with me.
Mr. Kolb: Excuse me, how did you come down? Bus or train?
Mr. Fairstein: I took train. I think the other – because I had never done any extensive traveling. I didn’t even realize you could take a plane down there, and I didn’t have any money. I had to borrow the money from my mother. So I took the train, and I should have taken the Southern, but there were two trains down, the Southern and the L&N, and I didn’t know the difference, so I took the L&N, which was really a mistake. The Southern was a much nicer train. While I’m talking about that, there was an interesting aspect to the train trip, because when we got to Knoxville, it took a side trip up to, what’s that town up at the top of the mountain, that’s now on I-75?
Mr. Kolb: North of here?
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Let’s see, not Jellico?
Mr. Fairstein: Jellico. Anyway, the train took a side trip up to Jellico to, I guess, either discharge some passengers or whatever, and it backed up all the way up the mountain, right.
Mr. Kolb: Knoxville too?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. Now it may have had another engine on what I thought was the rear of the train, but I don’t know. It probably did, but I didn’t know about that ’cause I wasn’t at the rear. Anyway, it did what it was supposed to do, and I guess after a half hour or so, it came back down and then went to the L&N – we had an L&N station then at the east end of Oak Ridge, as I recall.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, near Elza Gate?
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah, near Elza Gate, or whatever. It was close to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Dropped you off there first?
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah, dropped us off there. I don’t remember how I got into town. I do know I stayed at the, what’s the name of the hotel that’s –
Mr. Kolb: Alexander?
Mr. Fairstein: The Alexander, right, The Alexander.
Mr. Kolb: It was a guesthouse then.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, it was a guesthouse then, and that’s where everybody stayed who came to Oak Ridge. It was a very nice place even back then. Well, the roads were all dirt roads at that time and gravel roads, but the trees, I just thought Oak Ridge was beautiful.
Mr. Kolb: What time of the year?
Mr. Fairstein: It was in May, May of 1944, and I just immediately fell in love with the place. Now, it turned out I had a student deferment because I was an engineering major, but the draft law – and I was supposed to go to work, I was supposed to be interviewed by Tennessee Eastman Corporation, which would be Y-12, the electromagnetic separation process. Incidentally, I understand that my prof. got his Ph.D. – that his Ph.D. thesis was a design of the high voltage system for the electromagnetic separation process. I never tried to confirm that.
Mr. Kolb: That was during the war?
Mr. Fairstein: That was, well, he must have designed it in 1942 or so, you know, which was the start of the Manhattan Project. Yeah, it was during the war.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I’ll be darned, so he was involved too.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh yes, most definitely.
Mr. Kolb: What was his name?
Mr. Fairstein: Hahnstein, Professor Hahnstein, H-A-H-N-S-T-E-I-N. I don’t recall his first name.
Mr. Kolb: And he was the one that recommended you come down here?
Mr. Fairstein: Well, yes, he was the one that told the class about this interesting job that he couldn’t tell us anything about. I understand, at that time, that they had security agents traveling the [trains] just listening to people, and if anybody made any mention about the Manhattan Project, they got jerked off the train. They were in trouble for breaking security, ’cause everything was really hush-hush back then.
Mr. Kolb: So you had been warned not to talk about it, or not?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t recall. But since I didn’t know what was going on in Oak Ridge anyway, I –
Mr. Kolb: Did you use the word ‘Manhattan Project’?
Mr. Fairstein: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so you couldn’t have known then.
Mr. Fairstein: I couldn’t have known that, that’s right. Now, as it turns out, one of my friends who was also going to college at the time did know about the project. He was working for CBS as an assistant to Edward R. Murrow. My friend did the tape recording and editing for him. And he knew about the Manhattan Project. I mean, there was this – these really strangest breaks in security. After the fact, he told me a little bit about it, but I didn’t know that for starters.
Mr. Kolb: Well anyway, so you were at the guesthouse.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, I was in the guesthouse. It turned out that the draft laws had changed just about the time I was getting on the train, and the people at Tennessee Eastman couldn’t get in touch with me, but they told me they couldn’t hire me.
Mr. Kolb: When you got here, you mean?
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. Well, let me give you a little bit more here. My other two friends, they were really dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers, and they took one look at the surroundings and the dirt roads and everything, and they took the next train back. They were out. They wanted to go back to New York. One of them, his – I can’t recall his name right now, but he became the editor of Nucleonics, which was a McGraw-Hill publication.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I took it when I was a nuclear engineer.
Mr. Fairstein: And so did I. And the other one was Mort Scheraga, and he was the founder of one of the electronics companies. It will come to me in a moment; I can’t think of it right now. Anyway, they went back, and I looked around, and I decided, well, if I’m going to be drafted, I’d just as soon be drafted from Oak Ridge as from New York, because, as I said, I immediately fell in love with the place and I wanted to stay. So I went to the first employment office that I could find, which turned out to be General Groves’ headquarters for Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: The Castle?
Mr. Fairstein: No, it was not the Castle. It was the former Tunnell Building, which is opposite the bus terminal on the corner of Bus Terminal Road. It’s still there.
Mr. Kolb: It’s still called the Tunnell Building.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay. Of course, there were other things in it. That whole building, and I guess a couple buildings on either side of it were just all Army and the administration for the area.
Mr. Kolb: Right. That building was the employment office or had the employment office in it?
Mr. Fairstein: It did. I didn’t know it at the time, you know, I just walked in and just asked questions and it turned out to be the employment office. So I told them what my situation was, and they were hard up for technical people, so there was – we didn’t have a police force at that time but we had a guard force, and they were all Army personnel.
Mr. Kolb: MPs.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. There was a garage just around the corner, large garage just around the corner, where they installed the guard force radios, the radios for the – I’ll use the term ‘police,’ – for the police cars. And they said if I wanted a job there I could have it. Well, that was fine with me. I had been a ham radio operator since I was fourteen or so, and I was fascinated with electronics, you know, so I really had the background for this. I used to build my own transmitters and receivers, and so I fit in perfectly. It then turned out that all the radio mechanics were just radio repairmen that they’d picked up in Clinton and surrounding communities. I was the only one who had any formal education in electronic engineering, so it turned out I was a valuable employee for them.
Mr. Kolb: Who did you work for directly, the Army?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, the Army. There was an Army sergeant who was in charge of this operation, and they would occasionally give him jobs, small electronic jobs, which he in turn would turn over to me because, with my background, I was able to do whatever it was he needed. Evidently I must have proved quite valuable to him, because without my knowledge, he got me a draft deferment. I didn’t find out about it until after the fact. Of course, I was delighted. I didn’t really want to go into the Army, mainly because I thought my talents could be put to better use than to serve in the infantry or something like that. So that’s the way it worked out. Okay, what else?
Mr. Kolb: So that’s how you got here, and that was your first job. So you’re working for the Army in this radio – but were you installing, designing or both?
Mr. Fairstein: Very little design. No, the design was just for an occasional special project, and it wasn’t anything large. I was installing and repairing, which reminded me, the others, since they really didn’t have that much of an understanding of the radios, when something came in that was bad, they’d make a guess at what was wrong, and they���d just start replacing parts. Mostly it was tubes. It was all vacuum tubes back then. There would be a bad tube, and they’d just start replacing one after the other until they found the bad one and then the thing was fixed. In my case, I would sit back and analyze what was wrong with the thing, and I could go right to the spot. So I was more efficient at that sort of thing. There was another thing. These were Motorola transceivers, a combination radio and transmitter. They were about as large as a tabletop TV. They’re quite large and they were very well designed. They were very sensitive and they used the best components that were available at the time. Now, the installation, they were put in the trunks of the guard force cars and they were supposed to be fastened down with about a dozen screws, sheet metal screws that went into the base of the trunk. But most of the guys, they were pretty lazy. They only put two or three screws in there. And the roads were so bad, you know, the cars would be bumping all over, the things would break completely loose and rattle around inside the trunk, and then, of course, there were some major repairs needed.
Mr. Kolb: Was this battery powered or off the generator of the car?
Mr. Fairstein: It was off the car electricity.
Mr. Kolb: What about radios for the guard stations? Did they have those there too?
Mr. Fairstein: They must have had, but I never knew about – no, I’ll take that back. They had a – one of the guard areas was out near K-25 up on a hill, where you had a good view, and there was just a small shack up there, and they had a radio transmitter set up, but it was the same Motorola transceiver that went into the cars. And there’s no reason why it should have been any different, because, like I say, this was a very well designed unit, and the transmitter could cover the whole area, and they had an antenna up there, and it was no problem getting back into town safely.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Ed, I would imagine you had some kind of interesting relationships with these MPs at various times, that you worked with and for. Is that true, or could you give us anything along that line? You know, you were dealing with them in some respects, I would think. Or any observations you might have made?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, well, I’ll make some observations. We didn’t do much circulating there. I don’t know if the compartmentalization was deliberate or not, but we just didn’t do much circulating. There was another Army sergeant who would wander into our repair area, and he was a very nice guy. He came from, what’s the town west of Oak Ridge on Highway – not Highway –
Mr. Kolb: Crossville?
Mr. Fairstein: No, the other direction.
Mr. Kolb: Kingston?
Mr. Fairstein: No.
Mr. Kolb: Going east, you mean? Clinton?
Mr. Fairstein: Past Clinton.
Mr. Kolb: Norris?
Mr. Fairstein: No, why don’t you stop that for a second.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well, anyway, Ed, this Sergeant was from somewhere in this area, right?
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. He was a very nice man and he and I hit it off. We became friends. The sergeant who was in charge of our particular group at the radio thing, if I could recall his name, I still wouldn’t give it to you because he wasn’t a very nice man. He wanted his car painted, so he ordered one of the privates, not in our group but another group, to paint his car, and he had him put seven coats of lacquer on the thing and rub it down between coats, and, of course, the private was furious about this, but he couldn’t do anything about it. And he pulled other unconscionable tricks of this sort. And after I had been with the group for about seven months, I decided I’d rather go to the Army than have to work for him.
Mr. Kolb: So how did you pull that off? You’re not Army, but you’d like to be in the Army.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, the first thing I did was go back to the Tennessee Eastman employment agency. Luck was with me, and I think I’m a pretty serendipitous person in this respect, because, again, the draft laws had changed, and this time they could hire me. So I did hire in.
Mr. Kolb: When was this? You came in May.
Mr. Fairstein: I came in May, and this must have been around January of 1945. I think I was, yes, that sounds about right. So the people at Y-12 put me – the people at Tennessee Eastman put me into a small building in Y-12. I think it was 9735, and this was in the Process Improvement Division. There was a group there whose mission was to improve the electromagnetic separation process. They had an instrument library. These were just measuring instruments of all sorts. The electromechanical – there were very few vacuum type instruments in it, but they were just meters, including standards for calibrating the meters that were used. And the reason it was a library is because many of the meters were highly sensitive, like, they were microameters, and they simply couldn’t afford to buy that many for all the workers there. In fact, they couldn’t get them because of production restrictions, so they had just the bare amount that they needed to use, and they would be loaned out. People would check them out for particular measurements they had to make and then return them. Usually, the more sensitive meters would come back damaged, with the meter wrapped around the pen because they’d been overloaded or something. Well, as I said, I was very interested in radio when I was a kid and I didn’t have any money, so you were able to buy electronic materials on Cortlandt Street in New York. That was the center for electronics back in those days, and for all I know it still is. But anyway, I would occasionally get a meter that was almost usable for me and I’d take the thing home. I figured out how the things were put together, and sometimes I would rewind the coils on them to improve their sensitivity.
Mr. Kolb: Are you talking about here at Y-12?
Mr. Fairstein: No, I’m talking about [home]. So that’s where I learned how to work on meters, which fit in absolutely perfectly with the new job I had in the instrument library. One of my tasks, then, was to repair meters that had been broken in the field, and galvanometers, where you would have to replace the suspensions on those and one thing or another. One of the things that was interesting about that particular situation, it was a very small group. There were three of us. There was the boss, and then there was another assistant, and then I was an assistant.
Mr. Kolb: Who was the boss? Do you remember?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t remember his name. Just three people, and the other assistant was in the Army, and I really felt badly about that because I was getting what was good pay at the time. I don’t remember how much it was.
Mr. Kolb: You worked for Eastman now?
Mr. Fairstein: This was officially for Tennessee – well they were the operating contractor for the Y-12 area.
Mr. Kolb: So you weren’t in the Army.
Mr. Fairstein: I was not in the Army. I was still a civilian. I was paid a normal going wage for somebody with my experience at the time, but the poor Army guy, he just got a pittance, and I felt badly about that. He was a very nice fellow. He and I got along well. Anyway, after we’d been working there a few months, Tennessee Eastman decided to move us to another building, and we were expected to help move all of the test instruments because they were fragile and we didn’t want the movers to bang around. Well, my boss at the time refused to do that. That wasn’t his job. He’d been recalcitrant in other ways, and Tennessee Eastman decided that this is time that he should leave. So they fired him and I became –
Mr. Kolb: [Forced] him out?
Mr. Fairstein: Right, I became – no, they fired him. I don’t know where he went. So I became the group leader.
Mr. Kolb: Just you and the other man?
Mr. Fairstein: Right, just two of us, and we could manage. There wasn’t that much work there. Getting back to my first boss, he was active in a folk dance group in –
Mr. Kolb: Is this when you were working for the MPs, you mean, that boss?
Mr. Fairstein: No, this was after I got to Tennessee Eastman. The boss of the instrument group at Y-12. He was active in the folk dancing group, and of course, back then, we had to work up our own entertainment. There were clubs and all kinds of activities in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Including the folk dancing group.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, and some of them still hold over. You know, the library got started early on. Well, anyway, he talked me into going to the folk dancing group, and I was interested. I was never very good at ballroom dancing, but folk dancing was something that was – you didn’t have the complex – well, it was complex, but in a different way, and I really got to like that. And they would do some square dancing too, not the big rounds, but the groups of eight, the western squares, which I enjoyed. I made a lot of friends through that, and that’s where I met the woman who became my wife.
Mr. Kolb: Helen.
Mr. Fairstein: Helen, right. Back then she was Helen Chastain, and we met there.
Mr. Kolb: Well let’s finish up here talking about the work environment first, then we’ll go on to other things. Did you finish out then, during the war, working in that instrument electronic shop in Y-12?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. We worked there through the war. Then the bomb was dropped, and of course, officially, everybody knew about that, and there was no longer a need for the electromagnetic separation plant. In fact, from the start, I guess a lot of people know that there were several efforts at making fissionable material, and since nobody knew what the best way would be, we had several processes. There was the electromagnetic separation process, the gaseous diffusion process at K-25, and the graphite reactor at X-10.
Mr. Kolb: Thermal diffusion. The S-50?
Mr. Fairstein: I wasn’t aware of that at the time, and I still know hardly anything about it.
Mr. Kolb: Well, there was a thermal diffusion process, which was shut down, as I understand it, I don’t know that much about it, but I think it was cut off before it really – I don’t know whether it really succeeded or not, but I guess they thought it was expendable, and they had enough experience with the other two. They didn’t think they needed it. But there was an S-50.
Mr. Fairstein: There could well be, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. Now, the electromagnetic process was closed down because it turned out stuff that was far more pure than was actually needed. The process of choice became the gaseous diffusion process.
Mr. Kolb: After the war.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, and then for the manufacture or the production of plutonium, the graphite reactor was useful, so that remained, and, of course, there are graphite reactors in other places around the country, too.
Mr. Kolb: Right, Hanford.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. Anyway, they closed down Y-12 except for just a few of the electromagnetic separation units which became the stable isotope center of production for medical applications, which were gradually developing because they were learning about this at the time.
Mr. Kolb: This was Chris Keim’s operation, I believe.
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah. I believe so.
Mr. Kolb: So you kept on, stayed at Y-12?
Mr. Fairstein: No, no. I was one of the people that – they no longer had any use for our little instrument library, so that was closed down, and I got transferred. Now, do you want the details of the transfer? Because there is a little humor there.
Mr. Kolb: Sure.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay, one of the people that I had been helping in the Chemistry Division while I was at Y-12 with his instrumentation problems wanted me to stay on in the Chemistry Division, but the head of the operation wouldn’t have it, and I got transferred into the receiving department where I was supposed to examine packing slips, shipping documentation for things that they had bought, and if it was okay, I would transfer the documents from one pile to another pile.
Mr. Kolb: Paper shuffler job.
Mr. Fairstein: Paper shuffling, literally paper shuffling. Well, on my first morning on the job, after two hours, I just fell asleep. Boring, absolutely boring. Of course, my supervisor was very unhappy about this, he’d bawl me out, and I went back to paper shuffling, and by lunchtime, I’d fallen asleep again. At that point, I decided, that’s it, I’m leaving. He says, “You can’t leave!” And actually you weren’t allowed to. You couldn’t change jobs on your own. You had to be transferred, or you had to get a reduction, what they called a reduction in force. So I says, “You’re not gonna make me stay here. I am leaving,” and I went down to the employment office and told them, “I am quitting.” The man in charge there, he too was a very nice – I explained the situation, and he appreciated what I was telling him and realized that somebody with my background, technical background, shouldn’t be shuffling papers. So he says, “All right,” he says, “I’ll give you a reduction in force,” which he did not have to do, but he did.
Mr. Kolb: Technically he had to do it to get you [out].
Mr. Fairstein: Right. He had to do that to allow me to just quit the job. But he took that on his own to do that, and I was very grateful. So I was living in the dormitory at the time and I went back to the dormitory and just killed time for a while.
Mr. Kolb: Like how long? A couple days?
Mr. Fairstein: No, it turned out to be a few weeks. There’s a little bit more background here. While I was still working for the guard force – I was a motorcyclist. I had a motorcycle. I was riding a motorcycle while I was in New York, and my parents shipped the motorcycle down to me, and I’d ride around the area.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so you had it in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: One of the few probably.
Mr. Fairstein: It was an old Harley Davidson. It was a 1922 Harley, and it had pieces in it all the way from 1920 to 1930. Anyway, I’d made friends with another motorcyclist at the time, and we used to ride around together, and he was working at X-10 in a group called Instrumentation for Chemical Research, and it was in the Chemistry Division, and Cas Borkowski, who died just a few weeks ago, I believe, earlier in the year – he died recently – he was the group leader of that group. [Editor’s note: Casimer Borkowski died May, 2002.]
Mr. Kolb: Was he at X-10?
Mr. Fairstein: He was at X-10. And my friend John Francis was working for him as a technician, and John recommended to him that he hire me. Now there’s a little more background yet to that. While I was working for the guard force, I really got starved for classical music, and there wasn’t any of it down here. So there was a music appreciation group that had formed, and I found out about it and I started attending it.
Mr. Kolb: This is not performers, just listening.
Mr. Fairstein: Just listening, right, and we listened from records, and the man who – well, the people in Oak Ridge furnished the records, and the sound system was furnished by Bill Pollock. He built his own sound systems at the time and they were very good. He would bring them, set them up, and play the records, and he and I got to be friendly, and when he found out that I knew how to handle that stuff, he turned the task over to me. So I would go by his shop and pick up the sound system and set it up, and then I would play the records for the group, and I thought that was just great. It turned out that most of the people, most of the music lovers there were from X-10. But they would tell me, they would ask me questions about what I did there and so on, and they found out I had a technical background, and they says, well you really ought to be working at X-10. But they wouldn’t tell me what was going on. I had no idea. I mean, I could make a guess, you know, my knowledge –
Mr. Kolb: But they didn’t really tell you.
Mr. Fairstein: They didn’t tell me.
Mr. Kolb: They weren’t supposed to tell you.
Mr. Fairstein: They weren’t supposed to tell me, absolutely. And back then, everybody in Oak Ridge was supposed to wear a badge, because, of course, we had gates. The X-10 people, the people who worked at X-10 were told not to wear their badges by the X-10 administration, again, for security reasons. They didn’t want the people in the community to know who was working there.
Mr. Kolb: When they were in town.
Mr. Fairstein: When you were in town, right. Well, there was a conflict here. If the guard force caught anybody from X-10 walking around town without the badge, they’d haul them in. Of course, the X-10 administration would get him out, but there was always this conflict. Well, in any event, as I said, after I had left Y-12, John Francis was instrumental in me getting interviewed by Cas Borkowski, and we hit it off, and so Cas was able to hire me for that group, and our mission in that group was to invent electronic instruments that could be used by the chemists for either research or in their measurements of the plutonium, uranium, whatnot, the heavy elements. At X-10, there were a number of divisions. There was the Physics Division, the Chemistry Division, there was the Health Physics Division, and I’m sure there was more. I know that the Physics Division had an electronics design group of its own, and the Health Physics Division had their own electronics design group. Now, one might say that this was duplication of effort, and it’s true there was, but in the long run, I think it was really beneficial, because there was friendly competition between the different groups to come up with innovative designs.
Mr. Kolb: Was there some interaction between the personnel there?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, there was a friendly relationship between the groups and we would meet occasionally on our own, just to talk about what we were working on and exchange ideas.
Mr. Kolb: Now, Cas’s group, what department or division were they in?
Mr. Fairstein: This was in the Chemistry Division. Now, there was not an Instrumentation and Controls Division at the time. I joined X-10 in January of 1946.
Mr. Kolb: Who did you work for then? Who was your employer then?
Mr. Fairstein: The operating contractor – the University of Chicago had X-10 first. Then that was handed over to what became the AEC, then for reasons I don’t know, decided that University of Chicago shouldn’t do this anymore. For all I know, it was University of Chicago that didn’t want to continue in this role. So Monsanto became the operating contractor for the X-10 group.
Mr. Kolb: So is that who you worked for when you went there?
Mr. Fairstein: Officially, yes. I mean, Monsanto is the one that actually paid salaries to everybody. See, they were the operating organization. Like Union Carbide eventually became the operating contractor. I thought Monsanto did a very good job.
Mr. Kolb: This was still during the war? 1945?
Mr. Fairstein: No, no, this was after. I joined in 1946 and the war ended in ’45. But still, the research program was very active there, and the Biology Division had – I believe the Biology Division was still at X-10, but eventually they moved it to Y-12, and they took up a lot of room.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the mouse house and all that.
Mr. Fairstein: Early on at X-10, there was not an Instrumentation and Controls Division, but there was an Instrument Department. The designs that the people in the various groups came up with, the physics group and our group in Chemistry, would be produced, manufactured and produced by the Instrument Department or sometimes they would be contracted out to other electronics groups around the country, and these were instruments that were used in some quantity in the research program at X-10. Well, they decided that there needed to be an expansion, and the Instrument Department was expanded to a division, the Instrument and Controls Division. The one who was the head of the Instrument Department at the time was Charles Harrill, Charlie Harrill. He died several years ago. [Editor’s note: Charlie Harrill died in August, 2002.] When the new division was formed, Cas Borkowski was appointed Division Director, and Charlie Harrill was the second-in-command of the thing, and there was still quite a bit of departmentalization in the group. There was the fabrication group and then there was the testing group, and then our group from Chemistry Division was moved over into the Instrumentation and Controls Division, not only administratively but actually, because X-10 had started on a building program at the time, and what used to be old wooden buildings were all replaced by permanent structures.
Mr. Kolb: Did you work in the permanent 3500 building, I believe, that the I&C was in, or maybe still is, right in the middle of the plant?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, well, no, we were in 4500. Let me back up for a moment. The original chemistry building was in building 706A. This was a big wooden structure, and for those of us who worked there, we liked it pretty well, because they were cutting corners when they first built these, so there was gypsum board on the inside of the offices, but the hallways, they didn’t bother putting gypsum board up on the walls. So the studding was all exposed and you saw the back of the gypsum board. People walking down the aisle would suddenly stop and start talking and get an idea about something, so they would use the walls as blackboard. They scribbled on there. And in the studding, the exposed studding, there would always be a horizontal piece about waist high. You would plop your lunch or whatever you were carrying there while you had this impromptu session at the chalk board. Of course, when that building got replaced, you couldn’t do that anymore. Anyway, the 4500 building then housed the Chemistry Division and the Physics Division and perhaps one other, but I don’t recall that. And the Instrument Controls Division was in the 3500 building. Now, our group was set up in the 4500 building. I don’t know why, but it was. As a matter of fact, we had a hand in designing our own quarters, because when we started the move, of course, the construction wasn’t complete, and we decided that the best arrangement would be to have a combination of a laboratory and an office, with a wall between them. The office was rather small. It was roughly eight feet by ten feet or so, and the laboratory was somewhat larger. It was maybe ten by twelve or something like that. And that was a nice arrangement.
Mr. Kolb: What size group are you talking about? How many people were you talking about, in this group, roughly?
Mr. Fairstein: In our group there must have been, I would say, about a dozen people. Dick Fox was a member of the group. Dick Fox was one of the people that came down from Chicago. He was in the original graphite reactor project in Stagg Field. I don’t know if he had a formal education or not, but he was very good. He could do electronics, and he did a lot of the early – Cas got interested in the semi-conductor detectors early on, and Dick Fox literally made some of the earliest semi-conductor detectors that he used. And there was another electronics man and there were some technicians who were supposed to help the design engineers build the things. I resisted the use of a technician, because, actually, after I would complete a design, I preferred to be my own technician to actually build up the working model of the thing, because I was sort of thinking ahead about the thing being produced, and so I was working on final layout and looking forward to bugs that would develop in that process, and if you used a technician for that, you missed a lot of that. You missed that experience. The technician would simply build what you instructed him to build and that was it. Nevertheless, Cas sort of forced me to use a technician for a while. And I did, and we made measurements for the chemists and all, and I would put him to work at that sort of thing.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ed, let’s go back to the World War II era a little bit more and tell us a little bit about where you lived. You said you started in the Alexander Inn, of course, for a little while, but where did you start living and how did that go?
Mr. Fairstein: Well, for people who were working at the plants, they had dormitories. If you were single, you lived in a dormitory, and women’s dorms were separate from men’s dorms. I believe they did have a dorm or two for married couples who were the technicians – but I’m not sure about that – who were at the technician level, that didn’t rate better housing. Housing was very discriminatory back then in the sense that they were still building housing, you know, so the higher you are in the importance of your job, the better the housing you could have. Besides the dormitories, for the construction workers they had what they called ‘hutments,’ which were just large square things. A number of men would share the same hutment, and it was just sleeping quarters essentially. As I recall, there was a hutment area off Tulane Road. That eventually became permanent housing. I should back up for a second. In the really early days of Oak Ridge, when I came there, the population was something like seventy thousand.
Mr. Kolb: In ’44.
Mr. Fairstein: In ’44. And that was during the construction period, and then finally when they got the houses built and all and most of the construction was complete, the town immediately dropped to half of that size.
Mr. Kolb: Construction forces left.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. Then it became about thirty-five thousand or so, and, of course, you know that it’s been fairly stable. It’s been thirty thousand for a number of years.
Mr. Kolb: Right, about twenty-seven, twenty-eight [thousand] now, but it’s been kind of stable. So you lived first in the dormitory. Which dormitory?
Mr. Fairstein: One of the dorms where I lived was Dearborn Hall, and I think that was about halfway to West Village. Maybe I should back up a bit and talk about the community centers. There are a number of community centers in Oak Ridge. The one in the center of town was called Townsite, which has been renamed Jackson Square, and that had what little shopping there was available, and also it had all of the administrative offices. The Tennessee Eastman Corporation, I don’t remember where they started, but eventually they took over one of the dormitories and rebuilt it and made office space out of it.
Mr. Kolb: The ones down there where Charleston Hall, in that area, were?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. Charleston Hall, I believe, was a woman’s dormitory originally. That sort of rings a bell.
Mr. Kolb: The Carbide office was one of the dorms remodeled into an office building.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, and I think the Tennessee Eastman thing eventually became the Carbide office, as different contractors came along, they would –
Mr. Kolb: But the Dearborn was – we’ll keep going, then.
Mr. Fairstein: I think the Dearborn was closer to West Village. I started saying there were a number of community centers. There was an East Village shopping center, and then there was Townsite, and then there was West Village, which is around Jefferson Avenue or so.
Mr. Kolb: And then Grove Center, too.
Mr. Fairstein: And there was Grove Center, right. And each of them had a cafeteria, as I recall, for the people that lived in the vicinity. As I recall, Dearborn Hall was between Grove Center and Jefferson, and it may be –
Mr. Kolb: Is it gone now?
Mr. Fairstein: Some of these they rebuilt and others are gone. The YWCA, I believe, may be in a rebuilt dormitory, but I’m not sure about that.
Mr. Kolb: So it was on the Turnpike?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, I believe all of the dormitories were on the Turnpike or very close to the Turnpike.
Mr. Kolb: Around Jefferson, when you go east from Jefferson, there’s some old –
[Tape 1, Side B]
Mr. Kolb: The dormitory was on the Turnpike, you say.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And that’s where you went, initially? That’s where you lived, initially?
Mr. Fairstein: As I recall, yes. And then, of course, there was other housing. The next cut above that were the cemestos. Has anybody described the cemestos? Should I say anything about the cemestos?
Mr. Kolb: No, that’s okay, we’ve got plenty on that. But there was also barracks that the Army lived in.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: That were just open hallways like, I guess, no rooms, no privacy, just barracks, standard Army barracks.
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t know. I was never in the barracks, so I have no idea what that was like. And, of course, there were hutments and trailers. There were double wide trailers for the supervisors of the construction sites, and they usually had families, so they lived in the double wide trailers. There was lesser – the hutments, essentially, were for the people who were actually building the houses and building the roads and whatnot, and there was a large group of hutments in the Gamble Valley area. Of course, they were eventually all taken out and it became regular housing for the African American community.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know anything about the colored population, as to their segregation? I understand they were largely in the hutment areas.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. There was a lot of segregation back then. This was before the Civil Rights Movement, and then even after the Civil Rights Movement, there was still quite a bit of discrimination. So they lived in the Gamble Valley area.
Mr. Kolb: In hutments, initially?
Mr. Fairstein: Probably.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have much contact with African Americans?
Mr. Fairstein: No. I started having a little bit more contact when I went to work for X-10. As I recall, at Y-12, I can’t remember seeing a single African American, a single Negro there.
Mr. Kolb: They were probably all janitors that worked out there.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. And when I went to work at X-10, there were a lot more, but they were all in janitorial positions. There was one that we made friends with in our Instrumentation and Controls group, and he was a very bright guy and a very personable man, and it’s a shame that he didn’t get something better to do. Eventually, they moved him over to the Medical Division. There was a medical group.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Any other thoughts about the black people at the time of the war, especially?
Mr. Fairstein: Well, as I was telling you, there were very few of them working at the plants and mostly in janitorial positions. Now, when they put Illinois Avenue in – oh, let me add one other thing. A lot of the black community are hired out as maids and handymen, gardeners and whatnot, to the people who are living over in the other part of Oak Ridge, the white side of Oak Ridge, let’s say. And when Illinois Avenue was put in, that definitely became the dividing line between the black community and the white community. And there used to be access to the black community through Tulane Avenue. Well, Illinois went through that, and they closed off Tulane. So the blacks who were working in town had to go pretty far east to get over to Oak Ridge Turnpike and be able to go to their jobs in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: How did they go?
Mr. Fairstein: They had to go a couple of miles out of their way to get over here, which worked a hardship not only on them but on the people in town, because many people would have to pick up whoever it was that was working for them. When Helen and I were living there, we had a colored maid, and we’d have to get her. Anyway, enough people, I guess, complained about this until finally Tulane was cut through. There was an intersection made, so that now you do have direct access. And then when the 4500 building was built at X-10, the permanent building, in the basement there was an eating area, a cafeteria area. They didn’t actually serve food. Well, they had canteens, but they didn’t actually serve food there. And it started out, they put up a wall across the cafeteria, and the blacks had to eat in one –
Mr. Kolb: Black and white.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. And the white professionals got very upset about this and raised enough of a stink so they took that wall down.
Mr. Kolb: Really?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. Still, there wasn’t an awful lot of mixing, but at least you could mix if you chose to.
Mr. Kolb: See each other, yeah.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: When was this, about? Was this after the war, probably? Had to be after the war.
Mr. Fairstein: I think they started the new building program late in 1947 or something like that, and the building program took about a year to complete or so.
Mr. Kolb: Definitely after the war.
Mr. Fairstein: Right.
Mr. Kolb: So you really had very little contact with the black community.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. Now, there were a lot of people who were concerned about that, the Coveyous, Ida Coveyou and [Robert Coveyou] –
Mr. Kolb: He was a mathematician.
Mr. Fairstein: He was a mathematician, right. Ida was one of the people that organized groups to help in the black community, and she set up some classes and she asked me, she knew that I was mechanically inclined, she asked me to head up a carpentry class.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, carpentry too, I didn’t know that.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. Which I did, and it was held in one of the buildings over in the Gamble Valley area. I don’t recall which one. And that was an interesting experience, because many of these people had never picked up a hammer or a screwdriver and you really had to teach them everything. You know, just how to hold a tool.
Mr. Kolb: They couldn’t even do construction, I guess?
Mr. Fairstein: That��s right. They didn’t know anything about it. So I worked out a very simple woodworking project for them, built a small footstool, which just required a hammer and saw, didn’t even need a screwdriver for that, and got them started. Most of them put these things together and some of them looked good, and some of them looked awful, but they were, all of them, so proud of what they had done. And, of course, that gave me a tremendous feeling of satisfaction. I felt that I had really accomplished something there by teaching these people who had never picked up a tool before how to use simple tools.
Mr. Kolb: When was this, after the war?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, this must have been in late ’46 or early ’47.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, just after the war. Pretty early, though.
Mr. Fairstein: Pretty early, and the class lasted, I guess, about three months, and I don’t remember what happened after that. Somebody else, I guess, took over after that. But Ida was a great gal. She was very concerned about this sort of thing and she was a positive influence for good in the early days.
Mr. Kolb: There were quite a few, actually, that came on.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Oak Ridge pioneered desegregation in the schools later on.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, talking about desegregation, you know, when the Civil Rights Movement did come along, all the barbers in town were white. And they refused to serve any of the blacks, except one barber, the one that’s on Kentucky Avenue at Tennessee, what’s his name?
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know his name.
Mr. Fairstein: He has since retired. He was a new barber in town, and he didn’t object to serving blacks. So Helen didn’t go to a beauty parlor at the time; she’d go to the barbershop because she just had a simple hairdo, you know, and she preferred the men barbers to do it because they were quick and whatnot. Well, both of us were going to one of these barbers that refused, so we quit and we went over to the barber who was willing to do blacks. And he had a few black customers for a while, but they dropped out. I think they were simply testing the system, and they found out it worked, and eventually they –
Mr. Kolb: They must have done their own thing, I guess.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, black barbers, I’m sure, set up in Gamble Valley and they went there. But it was a transition time and it worked out okay.
Mr. Kolb: When you got on buses, did the blacks have to sit in the back, for example? I mean, was that the normal process, as I understand, that the South had, that you didn’t sit anywhere, segregated, you know what I’m talking about, on buses?
Mr. Fairstein: I know what you’re talking about. I’m trying to remember. I don’t recall seeing any blacks on our buses. It may be that they had separate buses for the blacks. You brought up the talk about buses; that is kind of interesting. When we first started working at Y-12, there was free bus transportation. They were essentially cattle buses, and people would pile into them, and, of course, the streets weren��t paved, and there was a lot of red clay, and if it had rained and you walked out there, the red clay would suck the shoes off your feet, so the women would get on the buses mostly barefoot, and they’d carry their shoes with them in a pack, and when they got to Y-12, they would clean their feet off and put their proper shoes on. The buses at first were free, and then after the community settled down a little bit, there was a commercial bus service was started. Prices were very low, something like ten cents. But eventually that went out of business, because by that time, everybody had bought cars, and people were simply devoted to their own transportation, and there was not enough left over to support a bus service.
Mr. Kolb: That was way after the war, of course; gas rationing was over.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: But the buses were rampant; they went everywhere, right?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And the kids and I loved to ride the buses, ’cause they could go free, go all over town and see what was going on.
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah. Well, I didn’t have children at the time, so I didn’t know.
Mr. Kolb: But, again, you said you didn’t see many blacks or even any on the buses, so they must have had their own, because they had to get to certain places and get around.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. I suspect that they had their own separate buses.
Mr. Kolb: Normally that was the big issue in other places where the blacks were segregated.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes, right.
Mr. Kolb: You talked a little bit about your recreation through the folk dancing and how you met your wife through that. Let’s talk about some of the other recreation opportunities you had early on. You said the music group, the listening music group was another one that you participated in.
Mr. Fairstein: The music listening group.
Mr. Kolb: What about the Playhouse and other things like that?
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, the Playhouse and then the orchestra was formed, and that was very popular.
Mr. Kolb: Did you attend both of those?
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes, and there were tennis courts sprinkled around. They built tennis courts and sprinkled them around. Now, coming from New York, tennis wasn’t as popular in Brooklyn and New York City as handball was. All of the boys played handball up against the side of the wall or whatnot. So there were very few handball – handball was not a popular game in the South, no, and a few of us who came from the North did enjoy it, and we found that the YMCA in Knoxville had handball courts. These were four-walled courts. We weren’t used to that in New York; they were mostly just one-wall courts. So we formed a little group that would go into the YMCA in Knoxville once a week to play. I tried very hard to get them to set up a handball court in Oak Ridge. That got nowhere. Actually, four or five years later, they did set up a handball court, just a one-wall handball court, but I think our group who had been playing handball regularly had disbanded. One person pulled a tendon, and I got a sprained ankle, and one thing or another happened.
Mr. Kolb: Pretty stressful playing going on.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, it was, yeah. It’s kind of a rough game, rough in the sense that it’s hard on you physically.
Mr. Kolb: But then there were the tennis courts, used for other things.
Mr. Fairstein: Well they used tennis courts to play tennis, but also a few of the courts just had a practice wall, and it turned out you could use that for handball, so occasionally somebody else and I would get together and we’d play handball against that, and sometimes I would just do it alone. But, of course, that’s not much fun.
Mr. Kolb: Well I was referring to the tennis court dances.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes, there were tennis court dances.
Mr. Kolb: With Bill Pollock.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, yes. I didn’t participate in them because I was never very good at ballroom dancing, but I know that they were very popular.
Mr. Kolb: And he was very successful in setting up the music all over town, Bill Pollock.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, great guy. He’s still around, I think.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, he still sets up, when you go to the Community Band concerts, he sets up the PA system still, with these heavy vacuum tube amplifiers. It’s just incredible. They must weigh a ton and he’s still lugging those things around.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay, and I know he will also make tapes for people or edit tapes if they have a tape that’s noisy or something, he can take the tape and clean it up somewhat.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. You need to call him at home for that. And I have called on him to do that a couple of times.
Mr. Kolb: So you were active in the folk dancing, you said, and the music listening, particularly.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, and also in the Playhouse. Now, I didn’t go in for acting, but I worked behind stage, you know, helping to set up the stage, and I was in charge of the sound system for a couple of years, so that was interesting.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know Paul Ebert through that?
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes. Paul Ebert is still around, of course.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, sure, early participant there.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And a host of other people that got involved there; that goes way back.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, and a lot of them became – well, I met a lot of people and Helen, my ex-wife, Helen, made a remark once that if you took all of the people in Oak Ridge and put them in a sieve and shook it, the same ones would fall out, which I thought was very appropriate, and it’s very true because people from the Playhouse, people from the orchestra, and in the folk dancing group, they’re all pretty much the same group of people and we all became friends.
Mr. Kolb: An eclectic group, I guess you might say, from all over.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Not locals, but is that true? Were there any locals that participated in things like that? When I say ‘locals,’ I mean the Tennessee area people.
Mr. Fairstein: Very few. I mean there were a few people from Clinton and Oliver Springs, I guess, but they were certainly in the minority, because most of Oak Ridge, of the permanent staff, permanent people in Oak Ridge came from all over the country. There was a large contingent from California, well from every one of the sites where there was research being done, California, New York, Chicago area, and Oak Ridge was a very cosmopolitan place back then.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, and still is.
Mr. Fairstein: And still is.
Mr. Kolb: That’s its unique feature, one of its unique features.
Mr. Fairstein: I’m sure there were many other clubs in Oak Ridge, but they didn’t hold any particular interest for me, so I’m not really familiar with them.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ed, when did you and Helen get married? You met through the folk dancing group.
Mr. Fairstein: We met through the folk dancing group, and we got married in 1949. Our first son was John, and he came along in 1951, and then three years later in 1954 there was Joel.
Mr. Kolb: How long had you dated before you got married?
Mr. Fairstein: Must have been about a year or so. Helen lived in a “D” house with five other women.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, wow, six women.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, and they would always have guests, you know, and I’d be a guest in the house. One of them was a nurse. Two of them were nurses. And there was Helen. She, at the time, had been working at Y-12, and I don’t recall in what capacity, but when she left Y-12 she did other things for a while. She worked on the Oak Ridger, and she was one of the founders of the Incky column. And later on, we eventually got divorced and – I guess I need to go back to the early parts of that. Helen came from a small town, Pleasant Hill, which is about fifteen miles west of Crossville. She went to a woman’s college and she was a real southern lady. And I was a Brooklyn kid, and our playground was the street out in front of the house, and I had all of the rough edges of a Brooklyn kid, so there was quite a personality clash between us. There were a number of things we had in common. We were both of us honest people, and we didn’t believe in cheating anybody.
Mr. Kolb: You enjoyed a lot of the same things.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, and we brought our children up that way. But the other thing, you know, the difference in our backgrounds, which eventually broke us up ��� now, she knocked a lot of the rough edges off me early in our marriage, and I think I hardened her up to some other things. Actually, we both benefited from that a lot. But, eventually, after the boys were big enough to take care of themselves and all, we decided to call it quits. It was a mutual parting, and that was in 1971. We have remained friends. Helen remarried. She is now Helen Jernigan, her husband is Harold, and all three of us are friends, and we occasionally do things together, so it all worked out.
Mr. Kolb: And you got some nice sons out of it, too, right?
Mr. Fairstein: Right.
Mr. Kolb: John and Joel.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes.
Mr. Kolb: And they’re right over in Knoxville, I understand.
Mr. Fairstein: They both live in Knoxville, right. John is partway between here and Knoxville, and Joel actually does have a house in Knoxville.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I guess you dated other women before you met Helen, too, during World War II, or did you? I assume you did.
Mr. Fairstein: A few, yes.
Mr. Kolb: It was a very busy, young town, and there was a lot of mixing going on.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, I was at a disadvantage from the very start, because the high school I went to was an all-boys high school, Brooklyn Technical High School, and it was an excellent school. Do you want me to talk about that at all?
Mr. Kolb: Sure, that’s fine.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay. It was founded by a man named Colston, C-O-L-S-T-O-N. And it was sort of halfway between a trade school and a regular school. It had two main educational sequences. You could take the technical sequence, or you could take the college prep sequence. And, actually, there was a lot of overlap. But you took the tech sequence if you didn’t expect to go to college, and you learned a lot of practical things, and, really, a fair amount of engineering. And, again, it was compartmentalized, departmentalized into mechanical, electrical, chemical, and so on. If you took the college prep, then you got more math, you took a language and so on and so forth. I didn’t think I was going to college, so I took the tech sequence. But then a very close friend of mine talked me into going to college. Of course, he was right. I should have done that. He did me a real favor and I’ll never forget him for that. We’re still friends. He talked me into going to CCNY. Well, since I didn’t take the college sequence in high school, I didn’t have a language, and CCNY required that you have a language, so I took a language. I took German because I’m Jewish and when we were growing up we talked Yiddish. My grandparents –
Mr. Kolb: Were German?
Mr. Fairstein: Right, they talked Yiddish in the house. My grandmother could hardly speak any English, so I became fluent in Yiddish. I had essentially gotten it. But Yiddish is very close to High German, so I took the easy way out with that, and I could have taken two years of German over a nine month period, but I was afraid to do that, so I tripled for the first six months, and then over the summer I took the last one. It worked. I mean, I was at sea for about half the term, but then everything started falling together, and I came out all right. So that met my requirement for CCNY, and I got in there and finished my education there.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ed, during the wartime period, what was shopping like in Oak Ridge and what did you have to do to serve your needs. Of course, you were single, you didn’t need a lot of stuff, but where did you eat, by the way? Did you eat at the cafeterias too?
Mr. Fairstein: I ate at the cafeterias. And I thought –
Mr. Kolb: Like all the other singles did.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. Well, everybody who didn’t live in permanent housing ate in the cafeterias. And I thought the food was pretty good.
Mr. Kolb: Which one did you eat at? Was it the one down in Jefferson Circle?
Mr. Fairstein: I ate at two. There was one near Jackson Square.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, the T&C? The T&C, it was called later. When I came here in ’54, I ate at the T&C, right below Jackson Square, right on Tennessee Avenue.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, that must have been it. I’ve forgotten some of the details, but I know I did eat there, and I also ate at the Jefferson Cafeteria, for no particular reason, just for some variety, but actually the food was pretty much the same. A lot of the people didn’t think the cafeteria’s very good, and there was this joke that was going around at one time that one of the guards found somebody rooting in a garbage can outside of the cafeteria, and he called him out and he says, “You’ve gotta eat in the cafeteria. You’re no better than the rest of us.” There was another incident that stands out in my mind. They hired somebody – of course there was a fair amount of cheating, which is universal, I suppose. Cafeteria workers would take the best food away, you know, to sell it in private shops somewhere else.
Mr. Kolb: Really?
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yeah, there was a big scandal at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in their cafeteria, the head of that cafeteria was doing that. And, of course, they fired him. I don’t know whether he went to jail or not.
Mr. Kolb: You mean he carried the food out of X-10 and brought it into town, or what?
Mr. Fairstein: He would divert the shipments that were coming in to a private restaurant, and the dregs would come into the official cafeteria.
Mr. Kolb: Well you could make a lot of money on the side.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yeah, right.
Mr. Kolb: Pretty ingenious. I never even thought about that.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, anyway, this one person who headed up one of the cafeterias, it may have been the Jackson, the one near Jackson Square, he would have them prepare a steak for him. They had steak, but it wasn’t done as nicely as his. You know, a regular meal that you would get in a high class restaurant. And he would trot this out and sit at one of the tables over at the end of the aisle, where you had to pass him as you went up to the counter to get your own food, and calmly eat away. He was rubbing it into the people, because you couldn’t get the food that he was eating. He was a nut. He was not a very popular man at the time, and I don’t remember what eventually happened to him, but he didn’t last very long. Somebody must have really complained about that.
Mr. Kolb: Did Roscoe Stevens have his restaurant in Grove Center then, the Oak Terrace, it was called later?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. That’s right. The Oak Terrace was a nice place. I used to eat there. The food was good.
Mr. Kolb: Roscoe Stevens was the manager?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, and there was more variety. Well, you could choose what you wanted to eat if you went to the Oak Terrace.
Mr. Kolb: Right, that was a restaurant, not a cafeteria.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. It was a regular restaurant.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve been told that there were lines for this, that, and the other. You saw something, you got in line just in case you needed something you needed to be in line for whatever.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, there were big lines. It was a straight cafeteria, you went through the line –
Mr. Kolb: No, I’m talking about other things besides food.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, for other things? There was very little in the way of shopping. There were a few drug stores. I remember there was Jim McMahon’s drugstore in Jackson Square, and that’s still there. That was one of the early ones. And then there was a drug store – each of the shopping centers had a drugstore.
Mr. Kolb: And then Miller’s was up in Townsite.
Mr. Fairstein: But that was afterwards. When we first started, there was practically nothing. There was a small tailor’s shop where you could get clothes mended and all, and he charged a fortune, because he had a monopoly.
Mr. Kolb: But he got some competition probably later on, eventually.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, yes. I mean, when the town [was] opening up, stores started developing, and for hotels and motels, there really wasn’t much. Early on there was the Diplomat and there was the Alexander, and that was about it. But now, we’ve got a plethora of motels and hotels.
Mr. Kolb: Well did you ever go to Clinton or Knoxville to shop, for example?
Mr. Fairstein: You were forced to in the early days, and we were not welcome. Oak Ridgers were not welcome in Clinton or in Knoxville, because, for one thing, we stood out. We didn’t have southern accents because most of us came from other parts of the country, so immediately they’d spot us that way, and also I guess they didn’t like the way we behaved. People from the big city behave differently from people who come from a small town.
Mr. Kolb: Do you think there was any jealousy involved? You were making better money than they were making?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t think that was it.
Mr. Kolb: Just different society.
Mr. Fairstein: We were different and we were disliked just for being different. We didn’t fit into the small southern town style. I will make a remark about –
Mr. Kolb: Well, were there any exceptions to that? Did everyone treat you the same way in terms of –
Mr. Fairstein: I can’t recall any exceptions.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I just wondered.
Mr. Fairstein: We were tolerated. We weren’t welcome. And at some places they made it plain, they didn’t want you around.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve heard that before. I’ve heard it the other way too, but people are different, yeah. Okay, Oak Ridge is a secret city. It didn’t exist on the map. People disappeared into this vacuum. And inside this city was security, security, security, heavy emphasis. How did this affect you in your work during World War II days? I mean, did you get the message it was bad – maybe you didn’t know what to talk about, you didn’t know what the process was that you were working on or why you were working on it.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, the technical people caught on early on. They didn’t really have to be told. They could just see the kinds of material they were handling and most of them had read technical journals before they ever came out here.
Mr. Kolb: So they guessed, you think they guessed there was an atomic bomb involved?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t know. I don’t think it was actually a bomb. They knew something big was going on, and they knew it involved the transuranic elements and uranium, but they didn’t know in detail. We didn’t really find that out until after the bomb was dropped, officially find that out.
Mr. Kolb: But did you speculate on that yourself?
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yeah, and like I say, I knew about the Manhattan Project before I ever came down here because one of my friends –
Mr. Kolb: Professor, yeah.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. But I didn’t know the details, and like I say, I figured out partly what was going on. We didn’t talk among ourselves about things that were supposed to be secure. We were very pessimistic about how good the security actually was. Well, there’s a basic conflict. In the scientific community, there’s cooperation and you share your technical information with whoever else is working on a thing. Now, in this environment, you couldn’t do that. And we didn’t believe it was going to be effective. And, of course, eventually we were proven right because Klaus Fuchs from Los Alamos gave away the store. I mean, he really gave the Russians all of what they needed to build their own atomic weapons. So I think on the whole that the security did more damage than it did help, and in various ways. For example, at Y-12, the people in charge, the superintendents, even if they knew what was going on, they were not allowed to tell any of the other workers. And shortly after I went to Y-12, I understand that somebody dragged some contamination into the offices, and they had to just trash, I mean, take all of the offices, dismantle and bury this stuff.
Mr. Kolb: Papers and everything?
Mr. Fairstein: Well, I don’t know about the papers, but certainly all of the furniture, because it all got contaminated. And Richard Feynman, you know, the physicist, he was sent to Y-12 to help with the process or to evaluate what was going on and all, and he was walking around, he noticed that there was a large store of uranium on the floor in one of the laboratories, and then a thin wall on the other side was office area –
Mr. Kolb: Just normal uranium? Not enriched uranium, of course.
Mr. Fairstein: I think it was normal uranium, but there may have been partial enrichment, I’m not sure. And he mentioned it to the supervisor there, and he says, “Oh, we can’t tell anybody about this.” But he pointed out that the people on the other side of the wall were getting exposed to radiation, you know, and it was actually dangerous. And I understand there were other places where there was real danger of getting critical mass together because the people weren’t told, you know, if you’re gonna store this stuff, keep it in small pieces and keep it segregated. Feynman was a great guy. He raised a big stink about that, and then you remember during one of the launches where the thing exploded and a number of people – and a school teacher who was on there, she got killed? Well it turned out that the reason that thing blew up was because they had the launch when the temperature was too low, and the O-rings became brittle, and the people who were working on the thing told them, the technical people, says, “Don’t launch; it’s too cold. I mean, there’s real danger here.” And the brass would refuse to listen to them.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my.
Mr. Fairstein: And in the hearings afterwards, Feynman gave a demonstration. He took one of the O-rings, which was very flexible, and he dipped it in ice water, took it out, it was hard and brittle, and he cracked it. And he wrote a report. His part of the report found the administration at fault, and they refused to include that thing in the report, and he wrote a separate one as an addendum. Well that’s the sort of a guy he was. He would pick out dangerous parts, and he wasn’t afraid to talk about them.
Mr. Kolb: Now, was he here as a consultant, like?
Mr. Fairstein: He was just here as a consultant. He was only here for a month or so.
Mr. Kolb: Was he from New York?
Mr. Fairstein: Originally? Yes, he was. As a matter of fact, he and I are sort of contemporaries. We both grew up in Brooklyn, and we both played with radios and repaired radios with pin money when we were [boys].
Mr. Kolb: Oh, did you know each other?
Mr. Fairstein: No, I never knew anything about him until after, long after, you know, when I read his biography.
Mr. Kolb: Going back to the security aspect, were you aware that there were spies in town, that some of the people were actually spies? They were paid to listen and report if they heard anything.
Mr. Fairstein: If there were any, I didn’t know any of them. I never knew anybody that I had the least suspicion about.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you weren’t aware of that.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, I was aware of security.
Mr. Kolb: No, I mean, you weren’t aware of these –
Mr. Fairstein: I wasn’t aware of anybody who was actually doing any spying.
Mr. Kolb: If there were.
Mr. Fairstein: If there were, and I don’t know that there were.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, we’ll talk about that later, but you weren’t aware of that. But you just saw the signs, and hush-hush, and that sort of thing.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, and you did have to wear your badge everywhere.
Mr. Kolb: So, you know, we’ve been told that people didn’t know that worked at K-25 what was going on in Y-12 or X-10 and vice versa. Was that true for you too? Of course, you worked at X-10 and Y-12, so you knew what was going on.
Mr. Fairstein: I knew what those two were and I knew about the gaseous diffusion project at K-25.
Mr. Kolb: How did you find out about that?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t remember.
Mr. Kolb: Just through talking with people? I mean you knew people that there was an area out there, where there was work going on.
Mr. Fairstein: No, I do know, I do have more reason to know about that. I told you there was an observation station – oh, that reminds me of the airplanes they used around here. I’ll get back to that. There was an observation place out near K-25 up on top of the hill, and when I was still on the guard force, they sent me out there one time to just – somebody had to be there every night and people took turns. And so one night they sent me out there, and we had a jeep that I could drive out there. And the road, that was kind of frightening, this very narrow road to get up there, and there was a dirt road and it was close to the edge and it slanted outwards, not very good shape. Anyway, when I got up there, I recall the place had hornets in it. And there were lots of them. They were buzzing all over the ceiling and everything, but I was never really afraid of insects, and I decided if I would leave them alone, they’ll leave me alone, which is the way it worked out. So I went to sleep with them buzzing around, but I didn’t get stung or anything.
Mr. Kolb: Hope they went to sleep too.
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but you knew that was out there then.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, and as a result of that, I had to pass the K-25 area, and I saw this monstrous building. I had no idea of the details of what was going on. I think I’d heard the term gaseous diffusion and knew roughly what the process was, but certainly none of the details.
Mr. Kolb: But see, some people didn’t even know about other plants. They just were isolated, because you didn’t talk about what was going on, so you just didn��t know, until later, of course.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. And there were gates, like there was a security gate not far from Montana Avenue. And if you were going to K-25, you had to check through that gate. So if you had no business in K-25, you couldn’t get in there.
Mr. Kolb: You couldn’t get beyond that point, right, exactly, and the same for Y-12, I guess.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. Every one of the areas had its own security gate, and you had to have a badge to get through, and they would check them. Of course, the security of the town, in one sense, was a blessing. There was no robbery in town. Nobody bothered locking their doors in their houses, and you didn’t have to worry about that sort of thing.
Mr. Kolb: Gate around everything and patrols.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: So parents felt that children were safe and sort of turned them loose.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, that’s right. Now, I started talking about the airplanes. The area was patrolled for prowlers, and there was a horse patrol. They simply wandered – they were guard force people, and they wandered all over the area on their horses, back over away from the roads and all, and there were two small planes. There was a Piper Cub and a small Aranca that patrolled the area too, simply looking for people that were walking around out in the woods where they shouldn’t be. And I made friends with the guy who owned the Aranca, because he would check in occasionally at our guard house while I was still working for the guard force and doing the radio repairs. And he would occasionally have some work that needed to be done on the electronics in his plane, and I would help him with that, and he took me up a couple of times. And that was interesting.
Mr. Kolb: Just to be able to see the area would be probably pretty exciting.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, that was fascinating. And he had an RCA radio transmitter in his plane that was installed afterwards, and it worked very poorly, because the antenna would not load up properly. I’m using jargon, but you couldn’t get the antenna to transmit, so he asked me to rebuild that thing for him. Well, with my ham radio experience, that was easy to do, and I literally rebuilt it, and I also doubled up on the amplitude, because he wanted more power.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so you got more range out of it?
Mr. Fairstein: Right, and for testing, he was on the ground one day, the first time we put the thing together, he called over to the McGhee – what was then – I don’t know if they called it the McGhee Tyson, yes, I guess it was still McGhee Tyson Airport, over in Maryville.
Mr. Kolb: Well, it’s still there now, but he called there then.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. So he called over there while he was on the ground and asked if they were picking him up and they says, “Yeah, you’re coming in loud and clear. Where are you?” And he told them and they couldn’t believe it. First thing, even if you were airborne from Oak Ridge, they weren’t sure he’d have enough power to get over there. And the fact that he was on the ground, and he still had power enough to get over there. So he was delighted with the fix I gave him.
Mr. Kolb: Where did these planes operate out of? Where did they land?
Mr. Fairstein: There was a small airfield over where the security gate for Montana, near where Montana Avenue is.
Mr. Kolb: Out here in the west end?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, over on the other side of the highway.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Was it paved?
Mr. Fairstein: Well, they put in a small paved – I don’t remember whether it was paved or not, but it was certainly smoothed down. I mean, it was adequate for a landing strip. They had two planes there.
Mr. Kolb: So it was inside the facility, inside the plant area.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, and they put up a shed to keep the planes under, and we just tied them down there.
Mr. Kolb: Were these Army personnel who did the flying?
Mr. Fairstein: No, they weren’t. They were civilians, and they hired them. But, of course they had to – security was pretty strict. They had their badges too.
Mr. Kolb: I never knew about that. That’s interesting.
[Tape 2, Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ed, you’ve got some more security information?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, one little bit. We were talking about the small planes patrolling the area. There on the hill, or the ridge, between Y-12 and Oak Ridge proper, there was a reservoir up there. And there was also an anti-aircraft installation up there. That stayed there for many years. Of course, nobody’s talked about that, but most of the people in town knew the thing was there. And, of course, planes were not allowed to fly over the area, and they really still are not. You mentioned something about there being an incident in 1956? I just vaguely remember that, of a plane flying over, and I don’t remember the circumstances.
Mr. Kolb: Well, one time, a plane landed by accident on a main street. I think it was something like that. The plane had to put down; it was an emergency.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And, you know, he just didn’t have any choice. But he got out of here as fast as he could. But that was an unusual situation. I’m gonna switch subjects here a little bit. This was a dry area, initially, for a long time. How did you locals cope during World War II with the need or the want, to get – now beer was available – how did you get your liquor? Tell me about how that worked. I don’t know whether you imbibed or not, but just whatever you know about it.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, Oakdale in Morgan County, Morgan County was wet apparently, and there was a small liquor store up at Oakdale, and the Oak Ridgers found out about that and they’d go up there to get their liquor. Now this was kind of tricky, because ordinarily they would search you when you came into the gates. I mean, Oak Ridge was still locked up, so it was difficult, and people did manage to bring it in. Now, there were some access roads. What is now Key Springs Road used to be called “G Road,” and that was not patrolled. And those of us –
Mr. Kolb: It was not patrolled?
Mr. Fairstein: No.
Mr. Kolb: You could come up there without going through a guard?
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Well, what an obvious leak in the system.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, but I don’t know how come they missed it, you know. And I think there were a couple of other roads in the Oak Ridge area that were in the same circumstance. It was a very narrow road, and I think it was a dirt road at the time, but I’m not sure. Very few people knew about it, you see, so I guess that’s one of the reasons they didn’t bother patrolling it.
Mr. Kolb: I see, but it��s an evacuation route, wasn’t it? Later on, maybe.
Mr. Fairstein: A little later on it became an evacuation route. I’ve got some words to say about that too. You need to remind me.
Mr. Kolb: So you could just drive right off that road if you wanted to –
Mr. Fairstein: Well, it wasn’t very good for cars, but those of us who had motorcycles, and we found out about that, and so when we’d visit Oakdale, we’d bring some liquor back with us, saddlebags.
Mr. Kolb: You had a lot of friends that you helped out.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. You know, I mentioned that I made friends with a motorcyclist while I was working for the guard force, and this was how I found out about it. I don’t know how he found out about it. He just explored, I guess. Anyway, the Oakdale people knew what the situation was, so you couldn’t just buy a bottle of good bourbon, you had to buy some other stuff that they forced on you too. Mostly it was liqueurs and junky stuff that they couldn’t sell to anybody else. They wanted to get rid of them, see. So if you wanted to buy a bottle of good whiskey, you also had to buy some of this other stuff too, which was all right, I suppose. Then later on Knox County became wet, and I don’t remember exactly what the details were.
Mr. Kolb: But that was a lot later, right?
Mr. Fairstein: That was a lot later, that’s right. I think that the administration in Nashville decided that the five largest cities in Tennessee could go wet if they chose to go wet, and Knoxville was one of them, so it went wet, and there was a liquor store that became very popular. It was the first one you came to as you went in on Highway 62, I believe it was, and so we bought our liquor there.
Mr. Kolb: What about bootleggers? Were they in the area?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. Bootleggers were in the area, lots of bootleggers. You could always get whiskey here, but you had to buy it from the bootleggers.
Mr. Kolb: But they had to get through the guard gates too? Or did they come up G Road too?
Mr. Fairstein: No, I think this was afterwards. I really don’t know what the bootlegging situation was as long as we had the gates here. I never tried to buy from them, and I don’t know of anybody else who did. I’m sure there were bootleggers, but I just didn’t know anything about them.
Mr. Kolb: Or you went outside, you could buy it and try to bring it in if you did it, something like that.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. Now, Oak Ridge became wet because we got a sheriff who was reasonably honest. And, incidentally, the political situation was pretty interesting. I guess it was mostly Republican. The center of the political scene was in Clinton, and they were all old timers and had a very close knit community, and you went along with them or you didn’t get what you wanted. Very early on, there were some restaurants that would serve beer, but they paid off the sheriff, which was the only way they could do it. There was always a strong political group in Oak Ridge, and they managed to take over the Clinton situation and we got some honest people in there. One of the sheriffs got fed up with this business of the payoffs, and he clamped down on all of the bootleggers, and I understand that he did this deliberately. That dried up the supply of liquor to Oak Ridge, at which point there was a referendum, and we went wet, and from that day on, we’ve had liquor stores in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Put the squeeze on the supply and that did it.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. And, of course, as soon as liquor stores did become legal, immediately, people wanted to start liquor stores and there was more than the town could handle. I don’t quite remember how they handled that, but eventually we got a reasonable number.
Mr. Kolb: Well I’ve been told that the G.I.s were not searched, so they became very popular sources.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay, I didn’t know about that.
Mr. Kolb: They had big coats and pockets, you know.
Mr. Fairstein: Now, I know that at the security gates and the one at Y-12, which I had to go through all the time to go to work when I finally got my own transportation, they were supposed to stop and search everything, including the trunks of the cars. One of the people decided they were just going to play a trick on them, because they got kind of lax at that. She was a bus driver, as I recall, the woman who instigated this. She must have been a bus driver that went through the gates, for a while there, when they did switch over to a formal bus transportation system. She and her buddy decided that they were going to play a prank on the people at the guard gate. And I remember what it is now, they recognized her, see, so they wouldn’t stop her or anything, they’d just let her on through. So one day, she came through and she had a friend tucked in at the trunk. He was in the trunk. And she was just playing a gag, see, so she went through the gate and she stopped on the outside and she yelled at the guards and she opened the trunk and her friend jumps out. They didn’t take kindly to that and she got in real trouble over that.
Mr. Kolb: She never got through again without being searched either.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Did she keep her job?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, I think she kept her job, but she couldn’t pull any pranks like that anymore.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s funny. There was all kinds of stuff going on that bends the rules. Back to a little bit more conventional topic. When the war was going on, you were single, of course, but did you participate in any war effort activities like buying bonds? Of course, you didn’t probably have a victory garden. Did you collect aluminum foil and that sort of stuff?
Mr. Fairstein: No, I didn’t do any of that, but I think I did buy some government bonds, partly through patriotism and partly to make some money on the interest.
Mr. Kolb: Right, good safe investment kind of thing.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well, Ed, tell us what happened and how you reacted when the first A-bomb dropped in August of ’45. Where were you and what do you remember about that whole exciting incident?
Mr. Fairstein: I keep thinking that I was in the old chemistry building at X-10, but that can’t be right, because I didn’t go to X-10 until 1946, so it must have been Y-12. Of course, we heard about the bomb.
Mr. Kolb: How did you hear about it? Was it broadcast?
Mr. Fairstein: Broadcast.
Mr. Kolb: On the PA system or word of mouth?
Mr. Fairstein: The very first announcement, I don’t know, it must have been word of mouth, but immediately, everybody at Y-12 seemed to know about it, you know, and all work was dropped and everybody was talking about it and was delighted to find out that this had happened and all. And then the next few days, of course, were just pure excitement.
Mr. Kolb: Did you go back to work after that?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, as I recall, we didn’t have any holidays. We just continued working. Of course, there wasn’t an awful lot of work done because people would be sitting around talking about it. I recall, I haven’t spoken to anybody who remembers this particular incident, but I seem to remember it pretty clearly, that the News Sentinel had an extra for this, and in their excitement, as I recall, they got their headline somehow all scrambled up. It said “Knoxville Sentinel View News.”
Mr. Kolb: The name of the paper was wrong.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, you know, whoever was setting the type up just accidentally messed it up. And I’m sorry I didn’t save that paper, and there’s a possibility I’m dreaming it, but I don’t think so. It���s so clear in my mind, but I never heard anybody else refer to that. But, of course, the front page was solid black in the largest letters they could find announcing the end of the war.
Mr. Kolb: Well that was before the war ended. It was the first bomb drop.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, the first bomb, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Took another week before the war ended.
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But wasn’t there a lot of partying going on or that sort of thing?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t recall. There must have been, but I just don’t remember. I was still living in the dorms, you see, at the time. I just don’t recall that part of it, sorry.
Mr. Kolb: Ed Westcott took the famous picture of Townsite, full of people, holding up that paper. Well, no that was “War Ends,” I’m sorry. That was a little different. What about the time when another big event, of course, was the opening of the gates in ’49, when the security gates were taken down and what about that time? Do you remember anything about that?
Mr. Fairstein: I remember very little about that. I mean, of course, everyone was happy that the gates were now permanently opened.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, were they? I understood there was a referendum taken and it was voted against initially. That’s what we’ve been told, and I think that’s a matter of record, that people didn’t want to lose their security, that they liked this secure feeling.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, that does come back to me, but it didn’t hold. I mean, the gates were opened. And, let’s see, Helen and I – I don’t remember exactly when they opened but –
Mr. Kolb: You were married in forty –
Mr. Fairstein: We were married in ’49.
Mr. Kolb: Well that was the year that they opened.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay, but anyway –
Mr. Kolb: You were so excited about getting married, you just –
Mr. Fairstein: Right. But anyway, we would, you know, we were so used to showing our badge when we got to the gate, every once in a while we’d come into the gate, and I’d tell Helen, “Where’s your badge?” and she’d start scrabbling in her handbag and then come to realize I was kidding her. But it took a long time to get over that habit. But I don’t remember any other incidents that were really tied into the gate opening, except for what you just reminded me of.
Mr. Kolb: Well there was a big parade. They brought in bigwigs.
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well are there any other unique experiences that you might want to volunteer just in general, things that come to mind about happenings that you experienced and people you might have experienced them with, offhand?
Mr. Fairstein: No, I don’t, really. I think I’ve told you about as much as I can recall.
Mr. Kolb: Well, what, in your opinion, has made Oak Ridge an unusual community. You’ve lived here a long time, since ’44.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, and I’ve seen lots of changes.
Mr. Kolb: That’s going on sixty, fifty-eight years.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. When we first started being allowed to have our own cars in town and started driving around, there were inspections. Your cars had to be safe to drive, and there were inspection stations. You had check in, I think it was every six months or so, to make sure that your brakes worked properly and all of your lights were functioning properly, and they all had to be adjusted properly. And I guess a lot of people complained about that, because they eventually quit doing it, but I think that was a terrible mistake.
Mr. Kolb: Now, this was done by the state requirement?
Mr. Fairstein: It was done by the state. No, I’m not sure; I really don’t know whether it was just an Oak Ridge phenomenon or whether it was a state thing. I’m more inclined to think it was an Oak Ridge phenomenon.
Mr. Kolb: During the war or after? You didn’t have a car during the war. You said you had a motorcycle.
Mr. Fairstein: No, I got my first car in ’46 or so. I’d been driving a motorcycle before that. So, again, I don’t recall whether that was a state requirement or a local city requirement. I think it was very good, but people didn’t like it of course.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, a hassle kind of a thing, you know.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. Now, when you’re talking about changes in Oak Ridge, for several years after the war – well, we were known as Science City and we were sort of like Los Alamos. The flavor of Oak Ridge, I think, was different from Los Alamos and was different from Berkeley, but still we were a very cosmopolitan city for quite a while. Clearly different from the surrounding communities. I have seen that gradually disappear. I think we are much more now a sleepy southern town than we used to be. It used to be that there were good drivers in town, because people who drove here drove like New York, I mean, they weren’t as wild as New York, but they had the same sense. Like a New York driver, if you see somebody coming towards you who has to be diverted into your lane because there’s some obstruction or something, they didn’t think about it. They just automatically pulled over to make room for him. And you would make room for people to pull into your lane when traffic would be tight and all, and it used to be like that in Oak Ridge. Not anymore. People use the inside lane, which is supposed to be the passing lane, as a cruising lane, except if all the traffic happens to be in the outside lane. Then if you’re in the side street and you want to pull in, nobody will pull over for you. It didn’t used to be like that. People were a lot more polite in their driving.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. We’ve got a lot more traffic than we ever had, too.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes we do, and I think it is terribly managed. A couple of years ago, or maybe about a year and a half ago, they increased the dwell time of the light cycle, which is terrible, because during rush hour, between two lights, it can become completely filled with cars, and people from the side streets can’t pull in. There is a progressive light system on the Turnpike, but the Turnpike speed is thirty-five miles an hour, the official speed, but the lights are set for fifty miles an hour.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes. And it switches – this is hysterical – our first city manager, I can’t recall his name, under Bissell, he was the best one we ever had. I think he was probably responsible for the first progressive light system. And that one worked out well. The lights would favor eastbound traffic at the end of the day, when the people were coming home from the plants, and westbound traffic early in the day when people were going to the plants. And the dwell time was reasonable, and it worked out very well. But then, when he was no longer – the following city managers made the system worse and worse. Every time anybody has messed with the traffic lights, they’ve made it worse. When Illinois Avenue was put in, that never had a progressive light system, and they randomly get out of sequence, so that there are times when you’re going along Illinois Avenue, you catch a red light at every single red light, so the average speed has got to be around ten miles an hour, and the administration doesn’t understand that this not only wastes gas, but it cuts down on travel time. And, again, they have increased the dwell time, which is pretty bad, because it’s just too long.
Mr. Kolb: Definitely the traffic system’s gotten worse. Of course, it started off pretty bad because you didn’t have cars, and now it’s gotten back to too much traffic to deal with.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, and for a while there, we used to have blinking, after eight o’clock at night, when there was very little traffic on the Turnpike, they’d switch over to a blinking light system.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they started that again on some lights.
Mr. Fairstein: It’s very recently because I haven’t encountered it.
Mr. Kolb: Just fairly recently, yeah, it’s certain lights, not all of them, but certain lights.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay, well, it should be done as a matter of course on the Turnpike.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I think it’s maybe experimental now, but they were trying it out, as I understand, but anything else? Well there was huge changes, obviously, in Oak Ridge, but I don’t want to get started on everything, because –
Mr. Fairstein: I think it’s going downhill.
Mr. Kolb: Well, what about the attitudes of the more recent Oak Ridgers, compared with the earlier original Oak Ridgers. Do you think there’s still the – well, it couldn’t be nothing like the excitement of World War II, of course. We don’t want to go through that again, I guess.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. Oh, I can’t tell much. Like I say, a lot of the people in Oak Ridge are still very cosmopolitan, but that’s because, I think largely because the surrounding communities are growing up. Like Knoxville used to be a terrible place to live, but now it’s a big city, and really a very nice city.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it’s gotten a lot better. You’re getting a lot of integration of all different cultures. Mobility is now the thing. In the forties that was just beginning. Because of World War II, people’s eyes were opened.
Mr. Fairstein: Of course, after the war, you remember, we were talking about that store, [the attitude] of Knoxvillians towards Oak Ridgers. That really all disappeared after the war when there started to be a lot more mixing and the Knoxville people found that we were a good source of revenue because we spent a lot of money.
Mr. Kolb: That’s true, yeah. Well, okay, that’s fine.
Mr. Fairstein: And then one other thing, I just thought of it. It used to be that Knoxville was a shopping center for everything from the Cumberland Plateau east, you know, from Rockford and so on east. Oak Ridge has become the shopping center of this area. Well, it shares it with Knoxville. People who live in Knoxville don’t come to Oak Ridge to buy, but there’s much less people from Oak Ridge going into Knoxville to buy because we’ve got so many facilities and stores now that we didn’t used to have.
Mr. Kolb: That’s true. We started out pretty slow, and it’s improved. Could get better, still, but that’s another story. Okay, Ed, well, listen, this has been very interesting and I really thank you for your insightful comments and you’ve had a wonderful career, a long career. You’re still active and that’s great. We’ll just sign off, so this is the –
Mr. Fairstein: Well, let me make one remark.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, go ahead.
Mr. Fairstein: I’ve enjoyed this interview. You’re a great Mr. Kolb, and you made it easy. Thank you.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I’m still learning, that’s for sure. Thank you, Ed.
Mr. Fairstein: You’re welcome.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Ed, we’re going to have you add an addendum here, something you brought up, okay.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay. While I was still working for the guard force, I got to really missing classical music, because there were no radio stations down here at the time that played classical music. And in New York, there were several. In particular there was WQXR, which is, I suppose, is a famous station, at least among people who are interested in good music. So I decided I would build me a radio to pick up WQXR.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, tuned to that frequency only?
Mr. Fairstein: No, it was just a general purpose radio. But, you know, I told you that I had a background and I was always interested in electronics, and I was a ham radio operator and I built all of my own equipment, so it was no big thing for me. So while I was working in this garage, I started collecting parts that I would need for this. And somebody made the chassis for me; it was roughly ten inches by twelve inches and about three inches high, out of sheet metal. I think one of the government agencies just made it on the side for me, and I had what are called socket punchers, to punch out holes for the tubes and so on, just ordinary tools for the rest of it, and some of the electronic parts I was able to buy, and some were tubes that were used for repairs of the radio equipment. Anyway, I built this radio during breaks on the job.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, at work.
Mr. Fairstein: At work, right, because we’d have breaks. You know, there were times when there was nothing to do, and if there was nothing to do, I would pick up on this thing, and I guess it took me about a month or so. I finally put this thing together, and it was a little bit more than you’d find in an ordinary radio, because I knew it had to be good to be able to pick up New York.
Mr. Kolb: And this was A.M., too.
Mr. Fairstein: This was A.M. And it worked, and I was able to pick up WQXR, and I started playing my classical music at work, much to the annoyance of some of the people who didn’t like that kind of music. But then I had a defender. One of the old timers was so impressed that somebody could build a radio from scratch, you know, and make it work, that this man needs to be forgiven, no matter what he does. So he was my defender. Well, anyway, eventually I took the radio to my dormitory and set it up there, and I was able to get a couple of good speakers, so I enjoyed my music in the dorm. Somebody, one of the other dorm residents, noticed this, and he became very suspicious, and he spoke to the authorities, because he was afraid I was a spy.
Mr. Kolb: He thought you were using the radio to transmit.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, see, so this is the incident that you were talking about, the monitors. So somebody from security came to visit me in the dormitory and I welcomed him, you know, and he wanted to know about that radio, so I gave him the circumstances, and he says, “Can it be used? Can you make a transmitter out of that?” So I says, “Well anybody who knows electronics can take any radio whatsoever and convert it to a transmitter if he wants to, but this one hasn’t been converted. It can’t transmit, and I’m not about to.” So I think the guy went away kind of suspicious, but he did go away and I never heard any more about it.
Mr. Kolb: You don’t know whether he put a tail on you or not.
Mr. Fairstein: I have no idea, and it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t attempting to break security.
Mr. Kolb: You told him the truth and that was that.
Mr. Fairstein: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Well you got some good reverberations out of that from your friend at least. You found out who liked classical music.
Mr. Fairstein: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF EDWARD FAIRSTEIN
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
November 13, 2002
[Editor’s note: recording begins with interview in progress.]
[Tape 1, Side A]
Mr. Fairstein: – [They said, “We can’t tell you anything] about it [a job in Oak Ridge], but if you’re willing to go down there, you will be allowed to leave about six weeks before graduation, and you’ll still get your degree, and you won’t have to take your exams or anything like that.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Fairstein: So that was wonderful to me, because I had been thoroughly fed up with New York. There was an hour subway ride every day each way to go to college and come back, and people were so – particularly on the subways – were so impolite and all that. I just wanted to get away from New York.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, big city life.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, exactly. So I came down, and there were two or three others who came down with me.
Mr. Kolb: Excuse me, how did you come down? Bus or train?
Mr. Fairstein: I took train. I think the other – because I had never done any extensive traveling. I didn’t even realize you could take a plane down there, and I didn’t have any money. I had to borrow the money from my mother. So I took the train, and I should have taken the Southern, but there were two trains down, the Southern and the L&N, and I didn’t know the difference, so I took the L&N, which was really a mistake. The Southern was a much nicer train. While I’m talking about that, there was an interesting aspect to the train trip, because when we got to Knoxville, it took a side trip up to, what’s that town up at the top of the mountain, that’s now on I-75?
Mr. Kolb: North of here?
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Let’s see, not Jellico?
Mr. Fairstein: Jellico. Anyway, the train took a side trip up to Jellico to, I guess, either discharge some passengers or whatever, and it backed up all the way up the mountain, right.
Mr. Kolb: Knoxville too?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. Now it may have had another engine on what I thought was the rear of the train, but I don’t know. It probably did, but I didn’t know about that ’cause I wasn’t at the rear. Anyway, it did what it was supposed to do, and I guess after a half hour or so, it came back down and then went to the L&N – we had an L&N station then at the east end of Oak Ridge, as I recall.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, near Elza Gate?
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah, near Elza Gate, or whatever. It was close to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Dropped you off there first?
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah, dropped us off there. I don’t remember how I got into town. I do know I stayed at the, what’s the name of the hotel that’s –
Mr. Kolb: Alexander?
Mr. Fairstein: The Alexander, right, The Alexander.
Mr. Kolb: It was a guesthouse then.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, it was a guesthouse then, and that’s where everybody stayed who came to Oak Ridge. It was a very nice place even back then. Well, the roads were all dirt roads at that time and gravel roads, but the trees, I just thought Oak Ridge was beautiful.
Mr. Kolb: What time of the year?
Mr. Fairstein: It was in May, May of 1944, and I just immediately fell in love with the place. Now, it turned out I had a student deferment because I was an engineering major, but the draft law – and I was supposed to go to work, I was supposed to be interviewed by Tennessee Eastman Corporation, which would be Y-12, the electromagnetic separation process. Incidentally, I understand that my prof. got his Ph.D. – that his Ph.D. thesis was a design of the high voltage system for the electromagnetic separation process. I never tried to confirm that.
Mr. Kolb: That was during the war?
Mr. Fairstein: That was, well, he must have designed it in 1942 or so, you know, which was the start of the Manhattan Project. Yeah, it was during the war.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I’ll be darned, so he was involved too.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh yes, most definitely.
Mr. Kolb: What was his name?
Mr. Fairstein: Hahnstein, Professor Hahnstein, H-A-H-N-S-T-E-I-N. I don’t recall his first name.
Mr. Kolb: And he was the one that recommended you come down here?
Mr. Fairstein: Well, yes, he was the one that told the class about this interesting job that he couldn’t tell us anything about. I understand, at that time, that they had security agents traveling the [trains] just listening to people, and if anybody made any mention about the Manhattan Project, they got jerked off the train. They were in trouble for breaking security, ’cause everything was really hush-hush back then.
Mr. Kolb: So you had been warned not to talk about it, or not?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t recall. But since I didn’t know what was going on in Oak Ridge anyway, I –
Mr. Kolb: Did you use the word ‘Manhattan Project’?
Mr. Fairstein: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so you couldn’t have known then.
Mr. Fairstein: I couldn’t have known that, that’s right. Now, as it turns out, one of my friends who was also going to college at the time did know about the project. He was working for CBS as an assistant to Edward R. Murrow. My friend did the tape recording and editing for him. And he knew about the Manhattan Project. I mean, there was this – these really strangest breaks in security. After the fact, he told me a little bit about it, but I didn’t know that for starters.
Mr. Kolb: Well anyway, so you were at the guesthouse.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, I was in the guesthouse. It turned out that the draft laws had changed just about the time I was getting on the train, and the people at Tennessee Eastman couldn’t get in touch with me, but they told me they couldn’t hire me.
Mr. Kolb: When you got here, you mean?
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. Well, let me give you a little bit more here. My other two friends, they were really dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers, and they took one look at the surroundings and the dirt roads and everything, and they took the next train back. They were out. They wanted to go back to New York. One of them, his – I can’t recall his name right now, but he became the editor of Nucleonics, which was a McGraw-Hill publication.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I took it when I was a nuclear engineer.
Mr. Fairstein: And so did I. And the other one was Mort Scheraga, and he was the founder of one of the electronics companies. It will come to me in a moment; I can’t think of it right now. Anyway, they went back, and I looked around, and I decided, well, if I’m going to be drafted, I’d just as soon be drafted from Oak Ridge as from New York, because, as I said, I immediately fell in love with the place and I wanted to stay. So I went to the first employment office that I could find, which turned out to be General Groves’ headquarters for Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: The Castle?
Mr. Fairstein: No, it was not the Castle. It was the former Tunnell Building, which is opposite the bus terminal on the corner of Bus Terminal Road. It’s still there.
Mr. Kolb: It’s still called the Tunnell Building.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay. Of course, there were other things in it. That whole building, and I guess a couple buildings on either side of it were just all Army and the administration for the area.
Mr. Kolb: Right. That building was the employment office or had the employment office in it?
Mr. Fairstein: It did. I didn’t know it at the time, you know, I just walked in and just asked questions and it turned out to be the employment office. So I told them what my situation was, and they were hard up for technical people, so there was – we didn’t have a police force at that time but we had a guard force, and they were all Army personnel.
Mr. Kolb: MPs.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. There was a garage just around the corner, large garage just around the corner, where they installed the guard force radios, the radios for the – I’ll use the term ‘police,’ – for the police cars. And they said if I wanted a job there I could have it. Well, that was fine with me. I had been a ham radio operator since I was fourteen or so, and I was fascinated with electronics, you know, so I really had the background for this. I used to build my own transmitters and receivers, and so I fit in perfectly. It then turned out that all the radio mechanics were just radio repairmen that they’d picked up in Clinton and surrounding communities. I was the only one who had any formal education in electronic engineering, so it turned out I was a valuable employee for them.
Mr. Kolb: Who did you work for directly, the Army?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, the Army. There was an Army sergeant who was in charge of this operation, and they would occasionally give him jobs, small electronic jobs, which he in turn would turn over to me because, with my background, I was able to do whatever it was he needed. Evidently I must have proved quite valuable to him, because without my knowledge, he got me a draft deferment. I didn’t find out about it until after the fact. Of course, I was delighted. I didn’t really want to go into the Army, mainly because I thought my talents could be put to better use than to serve in the infantry or something like that. So that’s the way it worked out. Okay, what else?
Mr. Kolb: So that’s how you got here, and that was your first job. So you’re working for the Army in this radio – but were you installing, designing or both?
Mr. Fairstein: Very little design. No, the design was just for an occasional special project, and it wasn’t anything large. I was installing and repairing, which reminded me, the others, since they really didn’t have that much of an understanding of the radios, when something came in that was bad, they’d make a guess at what was wrong, and they���d just start replacing parts. Mostly it was tubes. It was all vacuum tubes back then. There would be a bad tube, and they’d just start replacing one after the other until they found the bad one and then the thing was fixed. In my case, I would sit back and analyze what was wrong with the thing, and I could go right to the spot. So I was more efficient at that sort of thing. There was another thing. These were Motorola transceivers, a combination radio and transmitter. They were about as large as a tabletop TV. They’re quite large and they were very well designed. They were very sensitive and they used the best components that were available at the time. Now, the installation, they were put in the trunks of the guard force cars and they were supposed to be fastened down with about a dozen screws, sheet metal screws that went into the base of the trunk. But most of the guys, they were pretty lazy. They only put two or three screws in there. And the roads were so bad, you know, the cars would be bumping all over, the things would break completely loose and rattle around inside the trunk, and then, of course, there were some major repairs needed.
Mr. Kolb: Was this battery powered or off the generator of the car?
Mr. Fairstein: It was off the car electricity.
Mr. Kolb: What about radios for the guard stations? Did they have those there too?
Mr. Fairstein: They must have had, but I never knew about – no, I’ll take that back. They had a – one of the guard areas was out near K-25 up on a hill, where you had a good view, and there was just a small shack up there, and they had a radio transmitter set up, but it was the same Motorola transceiver that went into the cars. And there’s no reason why it should have been any different, because, like I say, this was a very well designed unit, and the transmitter could cover the whole area, and they had an antenna up there, and it was no problem getting back into town safely.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Ed, I would imagine you had some kind of interesting relationships with these MPs at various times, that you worked with and for. Is that true, or could you give us anything along that line? You know, you were dealing with them in some respects, I would think. Or any observations you might have made?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, well, I’ll make some observations. We didn’t do much circulating there. I don’t know if the compartmentalization was deliberate or not, but we just didn’t do much circulating. There was another Army sergeant who would wander into our repair area, and he was a very nice guy. He came from, what’s the town west of Oak Ridge on Highway – not Highway –
Mr. Kolb: Crossville?
Mr. Fairstein: No, the other direction.
Mr. Kolb: Kingston?
Mr. Fairstein: No.
Mr. Kolb: Going east, you mean? Clinton?
Mr. Fairstein: Past Clinton.
Mr. Kolb: Norris?
Mr. Fairstein: No, why don’t you stop that for a second.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well, anyway, Ed, this Sergeant was from somewhere in this area, right?
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. He was a very nice man and he and I hit it off. We became friends. The sergeant who was in charge of our particular group at the radio thing, if I could recall his name, I still wouldn’t give it to you because he wasn’t a very nice man. He wanted his car painted, so he ordered one of the privates, not in our group but another group, to paint his car, and he had him put seven coats of lacquer on the thing and rub it down between coats, and, of course, the private was furious about this, but he couldn’t do anything about it. And he pulled other unconscionable tricks of this sort. And after I had been with the group for about seven months, I decided I’d rather go to the Army than have to work for him.
Mr. Kolb: So how did you pull that off? You’re not Army, but you’d like to be in the Army.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, the first thing I did was go back to the Tennessee Eastman employment agency. Luck was with me, and I think I’m a pretty serendipitous person in this respect, because, again, the draft laws had changed, and this time they could hire me. So I did hire in.
Mr. Kolb: When was this? You came in May.
Mr. Fairstein: I came in May, and this must have been around January of 1945. I think I was, yes, that sounds about right. So the people at Y-12 put me – the people at Tennessee Eastman put me into a small building in Y-12. I think it was 9735, and this was in the Process Improvement Division. There was a group there whose mission was to improve the electromagnetic separation process. They had an instrument library. These were just measuring instruments of all sorts. The electromechanical – there were very few vacuum type instruments in it, but they were just meters, including standards for calibrating the meters that were used. And the reason it was a library is because many of the meters were highly sensitive, like, they were microameters, and they simply couldn’t afford to buy that many for all the workers there. In fact, they couldn’t get them because of production restrictions, so they had just the bare amount that they needed to use, and they would be loaned out. People would check them out for particular measurements they had to make and then return them. Usually, the more sensitive meters would come back damaged, with the meter wrapped around the pen because they’d been overloaded or something. Well, as I said, I was very interested in radio when I was a kid and I didn’t have any money, so you were able to buy electronic materials on Cortlandt Street in New York. That was the center for electronics back in those days, and for all I know it still is. But anyway, I would occasionally get a meter that was almost usable for me and I’d take the thing home. I figured out how the things were put together, and sometimes I would rewind the coils on them to improve their sensitivity.
Mr. Kolb: Are you talking about here at Y-12?
Mr. Fairstein: No, I’m talking about [home]. So that’s where I learned how to work on meters, which fit in absolutely perfectly with the new job I had in the instrument library. One of my tasks, then, was to repair meters that had been broken in the field, and galvanometers, where you would have to replace the suspensions on those and one thing or another. One of the things that was interesting about that particular situation, it was a very small group. There were three of us. There was the boss, and then there was another assistant, and then I was an assistant.
Mr. Kolb: Who was the boss? Do you remember?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t remember his name. Just three people, and the other assistant was in the Army, and I really felt badly about that because I was getting what was good pay at the time. I don’t remember how much it was.
Mr. Kolb: You worked for Eastman now?
Mr. Fairstein: This was officially for Tennessee – well they were the operating contractor for the Y-12 area.
Mr. Kolb: So you weren’t in the Army.
Mr. Fairstein: I was not in the Army. I was still a civilian. I was paid a normal going wage for somebody with my experience at the time, but the poor Army guy, he just got a pittance, and I felt badly about that. He was a very nice fellow. He and I got along well. Anyway, after we’d been working there a few months, Tennessee Eastman decided to move us to another building, and we were expected to help move all of the test instruments because they were fragile and we didn’t want the movers to bang around. Well, my boss at the time refused to do that. That wasn’t his job. He’d been recalcitrant in other ways, and Tennessee Eastman decided that this is time that he should leave. So they fired him and I became –
Mr. Kolb: [Forced] him out?
Mr. Fairstein: Right, I became – no, they fired him. I don’t know where he went. So I became the group leader.
Mr. Kolb: Just you and the other man?
Mr. Fairstein: Right, just two of us, and we could manage. There wasn’t that much work there. Getting back to my first boss, he was active in a folk dance group in –
Mr. Kolb: Is this when you were working for the MPs, you mean, that boss?
Mr. Fairstein: No, this was after I got to Tennessee Eastman. The boss of the instrument group at Y-12. He was active in the folk dancing group, and of course, back then, we had to work up our own entertainment. There were clubs and all kinds of activities in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Including the folk dancing group.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, and some of them still hold over. You know, the library got started early on. Well, anyway, he talked me into going to the folk dancing group, and I was interested. I was never very good at ballroom dancing, but folk dancing was something that was – you didn’t have the complex – well, it was complex, but in a different way, and I really got to like that. And they would do some square dancing too, not the big rounds, but the groups of eight, the western squares, which I enjoyed. I made a lot of friends through that, and that’s where I met the woman who became my wife.
Mr. Kolb: Helen.
Mr. Fairstein: Helen, right. Back then she was Helen Chastain, and we met there.
Mr. Kolb: Well let’s finish up here talking about the work environment first, then we’ll go on to other things. Did you finish out then, during the war, working in that instrument electronic shop in Y-12?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. We worked there through the war. Then the bomb was dropped, and of course, officially, everybody knew about that, and there was no longer a need for the electromagnetic separation plant. In fact, from the start, I guess a lot of people know that there were several efforts at making fissionable material, and since nobody knew what the best way would be, we had several processes. There was the electromagnetic separation process, the gaseous diffusion process at K-25, and the graphite reactor at X-10.
Mr. Kolb: Thermal diffusion. The S-50?
Mr. Fairstein: I wasn’t aware of that at the time, and I still know hardly anything about it.
Mr. Kolb: Well, there was a thermal diffusion process, which was shut down, as I understand it, I don’t know that much about it, but I think it was cut off before it really – I don’t know whether it really succeeded or not, but I guess they thought it was expendable, and they had enough experience with the other two. They didn’t think they needed it. But there was an S-50.
Mr. Fairstein: There could well be, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. Now, the electromagnetic process was closed down because it turned out stuff that was far more pure than was actually needed. The process of choice became the gaseous diffusion process.
Mr. Kolb: After the war.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, and then for the manufacture or the production of plutonium, the graphite reactor was useful, so that remained, and, of course, there are graphite reactors in other places around the country, too.
Mr. Kolb: Right, Hanford.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. Anyway, they closed down Y-12 except for just a few of the electromagnetic separation units which became the stable isotope center of production for medical applications, which were gradually developing because they were learning about this at the time.
Mr. Kolb: This was Chris Keim’s operation, I believe.
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah. I believe so.
Mr. Kolb: So you kept on, stayed at Y-12?
Mr. Fairstein: No, no. I was one of the people that – they no longer had any use for our little instrument library, so that was closed down, and I got transferred. Now, do you want the details of the transfer? Because there is a little humor there.
Mr. Kolb: Sure.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay, one of the people that I had been helping in the Chemistry Division while I was at Y-12 with his instrumentation problems wanted me to stay on in the Chemistry Division, but the head of the operation wouldn’t have it, and I got transferred into the receiving department where I was supposed to examine packing slips, shipping documentation for things that they had bought, and if it was okay, I would transfer the documents from one pile to another pile.
Mr. Kolb: Paper shuffler job.
Mr. Fairstein: Paper shuffling, literally paper shuffling. Well, on my first morning on the job, after two hours, I just fell asleep. Boring, absolutely boring. Of course, my supervisor was very unhappy about this, he’d bawl me out, and I went back to paper shuffling, and by lunchtime, I’d fallen asleep again. At that point, I decided, that’s it, I’m leaving. He says, “You can’t leave!” And actually you weren’t allowed to. You couldn’t change jobs on your own. You had to be transferred, or you had to get a reduction, what they called a reduction in force. So I says, “You’re not gonna make me stay here. I am leaving,” and I went down to the employment office and told them, “I am quitting.” The man in charge there, he too was a very nice – I explained the situation, and he appreciated what I was telling him and realized that somebody with my background, technical background, shouldn’t be shuffling papers. So he says, “All right,” he says, “I’ll give you a reduction in force,” which he did not have to do, but he did.
Mr. Kolb: Technically he had to do it to get you [out].
Mr. Fairstein: Right. He had to do that to allow me to just quit the job. But he took that on his own to do that, and I was very grateful. So I was living in the dormitory at the time and I went back to the dormitory and just killed time for a while.
Mr. Kolb: Like how long? A couple days?
Mr. Fairstein: No, it turned out to be a few weeks. There’s a little bit more background here. While I was still working for the guard force – I was a motorcyclist. I had a motorcycle. I was riding a motorcycle while I was in New York, and my parents shipped the motorcycle down to me, and I’d ride around the area.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so you had it in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: One of the few probably.
Mr. Fairstein: It was an old Harley Davidson. It was a 1922 Harley, and it had pieces in it all the way from 1920 to 1930. Anyway, I’d made friends with another motorcyclist at the time, and we used to ride around together, and he was working at X-10 in a group called Instrumentation for Chemical Research, and it was in the Chemistry Division, and Cas Borkowski, who died just a few weeks ago, I believe, earlier in the year – he died recently – he was the group leader of that group. [Editor’s note: Casimer Borkowski died May, 2002.]
Mr. Kolb: Was he at X-10?
Mr. Fairstein: He was at X-10. And my friend John Francis was working for him as a technician, and John recommended to him that he hire me. Now there’s a little more background yet to that. While I was working for the guard force, I really got starved for classical music, and there wasn’t any of it down here. So there was a music appreciation group that had formed, and I found out about it and I started attending it.
Mr. Kolb: This is not performers, just listening.
Mr. Fairstein: Just listening, right, and we listened from records, and the man who – well, the people in Oak Ridge furnished the records, and the sound system was furnished by Bill Pollock. He built his own sound systems at the time and they were very good. He would bring them, set them up, and play the records, and he and I got to be friendly, and when he found out that I knew how to handle that stuff, he turned the task over to me. So I would go by his shop and pick up the sound system and set it up, and then I would play the records for the group, and I thought that was just great. It turned out that most of the people, most of the music lovers there were from X-10. But they would tell me, they would ask me questions about what I did there and so on, and they found out I had a technical background, and they says, well you really ought to be working at X-10. But they wouldn’t tell me what was going on. I had no idea. I mean, I could make a guess, you know, my knowledge –
Mr. Kolb: But they didn’t really tell you.
Mr. Fairstein: They didn’t tell me.
Mr. Kolb: They weren’t supposed to tell you.
Mr. Fairstein: They weren’t supposed to tell me, absolutely. And back then, everybody in Oak Ridge was supposed to wear a badge, because, of course, we had gates. The X-10 people, the people who worked at X-10 were told not to wear their badges by the X-10 administration, again, for security reasons. They didn’t want the people in the community to know who was working there.
Mr. Kolb: When they were in town.
Mr. Fairstein: When you were in town, right. Well, there was a conflict here. If the guard force caught anybody from X-10 walking around town without the badge, they’d haul them in. Of course, the X-10 administration would get him out, but there was always this conflict. Well, in any event, as I said, after I had left Y-12, John Francis was instrumental in me getting interviewed by Cas Borkowski, and we hit it off, and so Cas was able to hire me for that group, and our mission in that group was to invent electronic instruments that could be used by the chemists for either research or in their measurements of the plutonium, uranium, whatnot, the heavy elements. At X-10, there were a number of divisions. There was the Physics Division, the Chemistry Division, there was the Health Physics Division, and I’m sure there was more. I know that the Physics Division had an electronics design group of its own, and the Health Physics Division had their own electronics design group. Now, one might say that this was duplication of effort, and it’s true there was, but in the long run, I think it was really beneficial, because there was friendly competition between the different groups to come up with innovative designs.
Mr. Kolb: Was there some interaction between the personnel there?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, there was a friendly relationship between the groups and we would meet occasionally on our own, just to talk about what we were working on and exchange ideas.
Mr. Kolb: Now, Cas’s group, what department or division were they in?
Mr. Fairstein: This was in the Chemistry Division. Now, there was not an Instrumentation and Controls Division at the time. I joined X-10 in January of 1946.
Mr. Kolb: Who did you work for then? Who was your employer then?
Mr. Fairstein: The operating contractor – the University of Chicago had X-10 first. Then that was handed over to what became the AEC, then for reasons I don’t know, decided that University of Chicago shouldn’t do this anymore. For all I know, it was University of Chicago that didn’t want to continue in this role. So Monsanto became the operating contractor for the X-10 group.
Mr. Kolb: So is that who you worked for when you went there?
Mr. Fairstein: Officially, yes. I mean, Monsanto is the one that actually paid salaries to everybody. See, they were the operating organization. Like Union Carbide eventually became the operating contractor. I thought Monsanto did a very good job.
Mr. Kolb: This was still during the war? 1945?
Mr. Fairstein: No, no, this was after. I joined in 1946 and the war ended in ’45. But still, the research program was very active there, and the Biology Division had – I believe the Biology Division was still at X-10, but eventually they moved it to Y-12, and they took up a lot of room.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the mouse house and all that.
Mr. Fairstein: Early on at X-10, there was not an Instrumentation and Controls Division, but there was an Instrument Department. The designs that the people in the various groups came up with, the physics group and our group in Chemistry, would be produced, manufactured and produced by the Instrument Department or sometimes they would be contracted out to other electronics groups around the country, and these were instruments that were used in some quantity in the research program at X-10. Well, they decided that there needed to be an expansion, and the Instrument Department was expanded to a division, the Instrument and Controls Division. The one who was the head of the Instrument Department at the time was Charles Harrill, Charlie Harrill. He died several years ago. [Editor’s note: Charlie Harrill died in August, 2002.] When the new division was formed, Cas Borkowski was appointed Division Director, and Charlie Harrill was the second-in-command of the thing, and there was still quite a bit of departmentalization in the group. There was the fabrication group and then there was the testing group, and then our group from Chemistry Division was moved over into the Instrumentation and Controls Division, not only administratively but actually, because X-10 had started on a building program at the time, and what used to be old wooden buildings were all replaced by permanent structures.
Mr. Kolb: Did you work in the permanent 3500 building, I believe, that the I&C was in, or maybe still is, right in the middle of the plant?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, well, no, we were in 4500. Let me back up for a moment. The original chemistry building was in building 706A. This was a big wooden structure, and for those of us who worked there, we liked it pretty well, because they were cutting corners when they first built these, so there was gypsum board on the inside of the offices, but the hallways, they didn’t bother putting gypsum board up on the walls. So the studding was all exposed and you saw the back of the gypsum board. People walking down the aisle would suddenly stop and start talking and get an idea about something, so they would use the walls as blackboard. They scribbled on there. And in the studding, the exposed studding, there would always be a horizontal piece about waist high. You would plop your lunch or whatever you were carrying there while you had this impromptu session at the chalk board. Of course, when that building got replaced, you couldn’t do that anymore. Anyway, the 4500 building then housed the Chemistry Division and the Physics Division and perhaps one other, but I don’t recall that. And the Instrument Controls Division was in the 3500 building. Now, our group was set up in the 4500 building. I don’t know why, but it was. As a matter of fact, we had a hand in designing our own quarters, because when we started the move, of course, the construction wasn’t complete, and we decided that the best arrangement would be to have a combination of a laboratory and an office, with a wall between them. The office was rather small. It was roughly eight feet by ten feet or so, and the laboratory was somewhat larger. It was maybe ten by twelve or something like that. And that was a nice arrangement.
Mr. Kolb: What size group are you talking about? How many people were you talking about, in this group, roughly?
Mr. Fairstein: In our group there must have been, I would say, about a dozen people. Dick Fox was a member of the group. Dick Fox was one of the people that came down from Chicago. He was in the original graphite reactor project in Stagg Field. I don’t know if he had a formal education or not, but he was very good. He could do electronics, and he did a lot of the early – Cas got interested in the semi-conductor detectors early on, and Dick Fox literally made some of the earliest semi-conductor detectors that he used. And there was another electronics man and there were some technicians who were supposed to help the design engineers build the things. I resisted the use of a technician, because, actually, after I would complete a design, I preferred to be my own technician to actually build up the working model of the thing, because I was sort of thinking ahead about the thing being produced, and so I was working on final layout and looking forward to bugs that would develop in that process, and if you used a technician for that, you missed a lot of that. You missed that experience. The technician would simply build what you instructed him to build and that was it. Nevertheless, Cas sort of forced me to use a technician for a while. And I did, and we made measurements for the chemists and all, and I would put him to work at that sort of thing.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ed, let’s go back to the World War II era a little bit more and tell us a little bit about where you lived. You said you started in the Alexander Inn, of course, for a little while, but where did you start living and how did that go?
Mr. Fairstein: Well, for people who were working at the plants, they had dormitories. If you were single, you lived in a dormitory, and women’s dorms were separate from men’s dorms. I believe they did have a dorm or two for married couples who were the technicians – but I’m not sure about that – who were at the technician level, that didn’t rate better housing. Housing was very discriminatory back then in the sense that they were still building housing, you know, so the higher you are in the importance of your job, the better the housing you could have. Besides the dormitories, for the construction workers they had what they called ‘hutments,’ which were just large square things. A number of men would share the same hutment, and it was just sleeping quarters essentially. As I recall, there was a hutment area off Tulane Road. That eventually became permanent housing. I should back up for a second. In the really early days of Oak Ridge, when I came there, the population was something like seventy thousand.
Mr. Kolb: In ’44.
Mr. Fairstein: In ’44. And that was during the construction period, and then finally when they got the houses built and all and most of the construction was complete, the town immediately dropped to half of that size.
Mr. Kolb: Construction forces left.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. Then it became about thirty-five thousand or so, and, of course, you know that it’s been fairly stable. It’s been thirty thousand for a number of years.
Mr. Kolb: Right, about twenty-seven, twenty-eight [thousand] now, but it’s been kind of stable. So you lived first in the dormitory. Which dormitory?
Mr. Fairstein: One of the dorms where I lived was Dearborn Hall, and I think that was about halfway to West Village. Maybe I should back up a bit and talk about the community centers. There are a number of community centers in Oak Ridge. The one in the center of town was called Townsite, which has been renamed Jackson Square, and that had what little shopping there was available, and also it had all of the administrative offices. The Tennessee Eastman Corporation, I don’t remember where they started, but eventually they took over one of the dormitories and rebuilt it and made office space out of it.
Mr. Kolb: The ones down there where Charleston Hall, in that area, were?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. Charleston Hall, I believe, was a woman’s dormitory originally. That sort of rings a bell.
Mr. Kolb: The Carbide office was one of the dorms remodeled into an office building.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, and I think the Tennessee Eastman thing eventually became the Carbide office, as different contractors came along, they would –
Mr. Kolb: But the Dearborn was – we’ll keep going, then.
Mr. Fairstein: I think the Dearborn was closer to West Village. I started saying there were a number of community centers. There was an East Village shopping center, and then there was Townsite, and then there was West Village, which is around Jefferson Avenue or so.
Mr. Kolb: And then Grove Center, too.
Mr. Fairstein: And there was Grove Center, right. And each of them had a cafeteria, as I recall, for the people that lived in the vicinity. As I recall, Dearborn Hall was between Grove Center and Jefferson, and it may be –
Mr. Kolb: Is it gone now?
Mr. Fairstein: Some of these they rebuilt and others are gone. The YWCA, I believe, may be in a rebuilt dormitory, but I’m not sure about that.
Mr. Kolb: So it was on the Turnpike?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, I believe all of the dormitories were on the Turnpike or very close to the Turnpike.
Mr. Kolb: Around Jefferson, when you go east from Jefferson, there’s some old –
[Tape 1, Side B]
Mr. Kolb: The dormitory was on the Turnpike, you say.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And that’s where you went, initially? That’s where you lived, initially?
Mr. Fairstein: As I recall, yes. And then, of course, there was other housing. The next cut above that were the cemestos. Has anybody described the cemestos? Should I say anything about the cemestos?
Mr. Kolb: No, that’s okay, we’ve got plenty on that. But there was also barracks that the Army lived in.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: That were just open hallways like, I guess, no rooms, no privacy, just barracks, standard Army barracks.
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t know. I was never in the barracks, so I have no idea what that was like. And, of course, there were hutments and trailers. There were double wide trailers for the supervisors of the construction sites, and they usually had families, so they lived in the double wide trailers. There was lesser – the hutments, essentially, were for the people who were actually building the houses and building the roads and whatnot, and there was a large group of hutments in the Gamble Valley area. Of course, they were eventually all taken out and it became regular housing for the African American community.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know anything about the colored population, as to their segregation? I understand they were largely in the hutment areas.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. There was a lot of segregation back then. This was before the Civil Rights Movement, and then even after the Civil Rights Movement, there was still quite a bit of discrimination. So they lived in the Gamble Valley area.
Mr. Kolb: In hutments, initially?
Mr. Fairstein: Probably.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have much contact with African Americans?
Mr. Fairstein: No. I started having a little bit more contact when I went to work for X-10. As I recall, at Y-12, I can’t remember seeing a single African American, a single Negro there.
Mr. Kolb: They were probably all janitors that worked out there.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. And when I went to work at X-10, there were a lot more, but they were all in janitorial positions. There was one that we made friends with in our Instrumentation and Controls group, and he was a very bright guy and a very personable man, and it’s a shame that he didn’t get something better to do. Eventually, they moved him over to the Medical Division. There was a medical group.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Any other thoughts about the black people at the time of the war, especially?
Mr. Fairstein: Well, as I was telling you, there were very few of them working at the plants and mostly in janitorial positions. Now, when they put Illinois Avenue in – oh, let me add one other thing. A lot of the black community are hired out as maids and handymen, gardeners and whatnot, to the people who are living over in the other part of Oak Ridge, the white side of Oak Ridge, let’s say. And when Illinois Avenue was put in, that definitely became the dividing line between the black community and the white community. And there used to be access to the black community through Tulane Avenue. Well, Illinois went through that, and they closed off Tulane. So the blacks who were working in town had to go pretty far east to get over to Oak Ridge Turnpike and be able to go to their jobs in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: How did they go?
Mr. Fairstein: They had to go a couple of miles out of their way to get over here, which worked a hardship not only on them but on the people in town, because many people would have to pick up whoever it was that was working for them. When Helen and I were living there, we had a colored maid, and we’d have to get her. Anyway, enough people, I guess, complained about this until finally Tulane was cut through. There was an intersection made, so that now you do have direct access. And then when the 4500 building was built at X-10, the permanent building, in the basement there was an eating area, a cafeteria area. They didn’t actually serve food. Well, they had canteens, but they didn’t actually serve food there. And it started out, they put up a wall across the cafeteria, and the blacks had to eat in one –
Mr. Kolb: Black and white.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. And the white professionals got very upset about this and raised enough of a stink so they took that wall down.
Mr. Kolb: Really?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. Still, there wasn’t an awful lot of mixing, but at least you could mix if you chose to.
Mr. Kolb: See each other, yeah.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: When was this, about? Was this after the war, probably? Had to be after the war.
Mr. Fairstein: I think they started the new building program late in 1947 or something like that, and the building program took about a year to complete or so.
Mr. Kolb: Definitely after the war.
Mr. Fairstein: Right.
Mr. Kolb: So you really had very little contact with the black community.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. Now, there were a lot of people who were concerned about that, the Coveyous, Ida Coveyou and [Robert Coveyou] –
Mr. Kolb: He was a mathematician.
Mr. Fairstein: He was a mathematician, right. Ida was one of the people that organized groups to help in the black community, and she set up some classes and she asked me, she knew that I was mechanically inclined, she asked me to head up a carpentry class.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, carpentry too, I didn’t know that.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. Which I did, and it was held in one of the buildings over in the Gamble Valley area. I don’t recall which one. And that was an interesting experience, because many of these people had never picked up a hammer or a screwdriver and you really had to teach them everything. You know, just how to hold a tool.
Mr. Kolb: They couldn’t even do construction, I guess?
Mr. Fairstein: That��s right. They didn’t know anything about it. So I worked out a very simple woodworking project for them, built a small footstool, which just required a hammer and saw, didn’t even need a screwdriver for that, and got them started. Most of them put these things together and some of them looked good, and some of them looked awful, but they were, all of them, so proud of what they had done. And, of course, that gave me a tremendous feeling of satisfaction. I felt that I had really accomplished something there by teaching these people who had never picked up a tool before how to use simple tools.
Mr. Kolb: When was this, after the war?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, this must have been in late ’46 or early ’47.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, just after the war. Pretty early, though.
Mr. Fairstein: Pretty early, and the class lasted, I guess, about three months, and I don’t remember what happened after that. Somebody else, I guess, took over after that. But Ida was a great gal. She was very concerned about this sort of thing and she was a positive influence for good in the early days.
Mr. Kolb: There were quite a few, actually, that came on.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Oak Ridge pioneered desegregation in the schools later on.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, talking about desegregation, you know, when the Civil Rights Movement did come along, all the barbers in town were white. And they refused to serve any of the blacks, except one barber, the one that’s on Kentucky Avenue at Tennessee, what’s his name?
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know his name.
Mr. Fairstein: He has since retired. He was a new barber in town, and he didn’t object to serving blacks. So Helen didn’t go to a beauty parlor at the time; she’d go to the barbershop because she just had a simple hairdo, you know, and she preferred the men barbers to do it because they were quick and whatnot. Well, both of us were going to one of these barbers that refused, so we quit and we went over to the barber who was willing to do blacks. And he had a few black customers for a while, but they dropped out. I think they were simply testing the system, and they found out it worked, and eventually they –
Mr. Kolb: They must have done their own thing, I guess.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, black barbers, I’m sure, set up in Gamble Valley and they went there. But it was a transition time and it worked out okay.
Mr. Kolb: When you got on buses, did the blacks have to sit in the back, for example? I mean, was that the normal process, as I understand, that the South had, that you didn’t sit anywhere, segregated, you know what I’m talking about, on buses?
Mr. Fairstein: I know what you’re talking about. I’m trying to remember. I don’t recall seeing any blacks on our buses. It may be that they had separate buses for the blacks. You brought up the talk about buses; that is kind of interesting. When we first started working at Y-12, there was free bus transportation. They were essentially cattle buses, and people would pile into them, and, of course, the streets weren��t paved, and there was a lot of red clay, and if it had rained and you walked out there, the red clay would suck the shoes off your feet, so the women would get on the buses mostly barefoot, and they’d carry their shoes with them in a pack, and when they got to Y-12, they would clean their feet off and put their proper shoes on. The buses at first were free, and then after the community settled down a little bit, there was a commercial bus service was started. Prices were very low, something like ten cents. But eventually that went out of business, because by that time, everybody had bought cars, and people were simply devoted to their own transportation, and there was not enough left over to support a bus service.
Mr. Kolb: That was way after the war, of course; gas rationing was over.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: But the buses were rampant; they went everywhere, right?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And the kids and I loved to ride the buses, ’cause they could go free, go all over town and see what was going on.
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah. Well, I didn’t have children at the time, so I didn’t know.
Mr. Kolb: But, again, you said you didn’t see many blacks or even any on the buses, so they must have had their own, because they had to get to certain places and get around.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. I suspect that they had their own separate buses.
Mr. Kolb: Normally that was the big issue in other places where the blacks were segregated.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes, right.
Mr. Kolb: You talked a little bit about your recreation through the folk dancing and how you met your wife through that. Let’s talk about some of the other recreation opportunities you had early on. You said the music group, the listening music group was another one that you participated in.
Mr. Fairstein: The music listening group.
Mr. Kolb: What about the Playhouse and other things like that?
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, the Playhouse and then the orchestra was formed, and that was very popular.
Mr. Kolb: Did you attend both of those?
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes, and there were tennis courts sprinkled around. They built tennis courts and sprinkled them around. Now, coming from New York, tennis wasn’t as popular in Brooklyn and New York City as handball was. All of the boys played handball up against the side of the wall or whatnot. So there were very few handball – handball was not a popular game in the South, no, and a few of us who came from the North did enjoy it, and we found that the YMCA in Knoxville had handball courts. These were four-walled courts. We weren’t used to that in New York; they were mostly just one-wall courts. So we formed a little group that would go into the YMCA in Knoxville once a week to play. I tried very hard to get them to set up a handball court in Oak Ridge. That got nowhere. Actually, four or five years later, they did set up a handball court, just a one-wall handball court, but I think our group who had been playing handball regularly had disbanded. One person pulled a tendon, and I got a sprained ankle, and one thing or another happened.
Mr. Kolb: Pretty stressful playing going on.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, it was, yeah. It’s kind of a rough game, rough in the sense that it’s hard on you physically.
Mr. Kolb: But then there were the tennis courts, used for other things.
Mr. Fairstein: Well they used tennis courts to play tennis, but also a few of the courts just had a practice wall, and it turned out you could use that for handball, so occasionally somebody else and I would get together and we’d play handball against that, and sometimes I would just do it alone. But, of course, that’s not much fun.
Mr. Kolb: Well I was referring to the tennis court dances.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes, there were tennis court dances.
Mr. Kolb: With Bill Pollock.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, yes. I didn’t participate in them because I was never very good at ballroom dancing, but I know that they were very popular.
Mr. Kolb: And he was very successful in setting up the music all over town, Bill Pollock.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, great guy. He’s still around, I think.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, he still sets up, when you go to the Community Band concerts, he sets up the PA system still, with these heavy vacuum tube amplifiers. It’s just incredible. They must weigh a ton and he’s still lugging those things around.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay, and I know he will also make tapes for people or edit tapes if they have a tape that’s noisy or something, he can take the tape and clean it up somewhat.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. You need to call him at home for that. And I have called on him to do that a couple of times.
Mr. Kolb: So you were active in the folk dancing, you said, and the music listening, particularly.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, and also in the Playhouse. Now, I didn’t go in for acting, but I worked behind stage, you know, helping to set up the stage, and I was in charge of the sound system for a couple of years, so that was interesting.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know Paul Ebert through that?
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes. Paul Ebert is still around, of course.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, sure, early participant there.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And a host of other people that got involved there; that goes way back.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, and a lot of them became – well, I met a lot of people and Helen, my ex-wife, Helen, made a remark once that if you took all of the people in Oak Ridge and put them in a sieve and shook it, the same ones would fall out, which I thought was very appropriate, and it’s very true because people from the Playhouse, people from the orchestra, and in the folk dancing group, they’re all pretty much the same group of people and we all became friends.
Mr. Kolb: An eclectic group, I guess you might say, from all over.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Not locals, but is that true? Were there any locals that participated in things like that? When I say ‘locals,’ I mean the Tennessee area people.
Mr. Fairstein: Very few. I mean there were a few people from Clinton and Oliver Springs, I guess, but they were certainly in the minority, because most of Oak Ridge, of the permanent staff, permanent people in Oak Ridge came from all over the country. There was a large contingent from California, well from every one of the sites where there was research being done, California, New York, Chicago area, and Oak Ridge was a very cosmopolitan place back then.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, and still is.
Mr. Fairstein: And still is.
Mr. Kolb: That’s its unique feature, one of its unique features.
Mr. Fairstein: I’m sure there were many other clubs in Oak Ridge, but they didn’t hold any particular interest for me, so I’m not really familiar with them.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ed, when did you and Helen get married? You met through the folk dancing group.
Mr. Fairstein: We met through the folk dancing group, and we got married in 1949. Our first son was John, and he came along in 1951, and then three years later in 1954 there was Joel.
Mr. Kolb: How long had you dated before you got married?
Mr. Fairstein: Must have been about a year or so. Helen lived in a “D” house with five other women.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, wow, six women.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, and they would always have guests, you know, and I’d be a guest in the house. One of them was a nurse. Two of them were nurses. And there was Helen. She, at the time, had been working at Y-12, and I don’t recall in what capacity, but when she left Y-12 she did other things for a while. She worked on the Oak Ridger, and she was one of the founders of the Incky column. And later on, we eventually got divorced and – I guess I need to go back to the early parts of that. Helen came from a small town, Pleasant Hill, which is about fifteen miles west of Crossville. She went to a woman’s college and she was a real southern lady. And I was a Brooklyn kid, and our playground was the street out in front of the house, and I had all of the rough edges of a Brooklyn kid, so there was quite a personality clash between us. There were a number of things we had in common. We were both of us honest people, and we didn’t believe in cheating anybody.
Mr. Kolb: You enjoyed a lot of the same things.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, and we brought our children up that way. But the other thing, you know, the difference in our backgrounds, which eventually broke us up ��� now, she knocked a lot of the rough edges off me early in our marriage, and I think I hardened her up to some other things. Actually, we both benefited from that a lot. But, eventually, after the boys were big enough to take care of themselves and all, we decided to call it quits. It was a mutual parting, and that was in 1971. We have remained friends. Helen remarried. She is now Helen Jernigan, her husband is Harold, and all three of us are friends, and we occasionally do things together, so it all worked out.
Mr. Kolb: And you got some nice sons out of it, too, right?
Mr. Fairstein: Right.
Mr. Kolb: John and Joel.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes.
Mr. Kolb: And they’re right over in Knoxville, I understand.
Mr. Fairstein: They both live in Knoxville, right. John is partway between here and Knoxville, and Joel actually does have a house in Knoxville.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I guess you dated other women before you met Helen, too, during World War II, or did you? I assume you did.
Mr. Fairstein: A few, yes.
Mr. Kolb: It was a very busy, young town, and there was a lot of mixing going on.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, I was at a disadvantage from the very start, because the high school I went to was an all-boys high school, Brooklyn Technical High School, and it was an excellent school. Do you want me to talk about that at all?
Mr. Kolb: Sure, that’s fine.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay. It was founded by a man named Colston, C-O-L-S-T-O-N. And it was sort of halfway between a trade school and a regular school. It had two main educational sequences. You could take the technical sequence, or you could take the college prep sequence. And, actually, there was a lot of overlap. But you took the tech sequence if you didn’t expect to go to college, and you learned a lot of practical things, and, really, a fair amount of engineering. And, again, it was compartmentalized, departmentalized into mechanical, electrical, chemical, and so on. If you took the college prep, then you got more math, you took a language and so on and so forth. I didn’t think I was going to college, so I took the tech sequence. But then a very close friend of mine talked me into going to college. Of course, he was right. I should have done that. He did me a real favor and I’ll never forget him for that. We’re still friends. He talked me into going to CCNY. Well, since I didn’t take the college sequence in high school, I didn’t have a language, and CCNY required that you have a language, so I took a language. I took German because I’m Jewish and when we were growing up we talked Yiddish. My grandparents –
Mr. Kolb: Were German?
Mr. Fairstein: Right, they talked Yiddish in the house. My grandmother could hardly speak any English, so I became fluent in Yiddish. I had essentially gotten it. But Yiddish is very close to High German, so I took the easy way out with that, and I could have taken two years of German over a nine month period, but I was afraid to do that, so I tripled for the first six months, and then over the summer I took the last one. It worked. I mean, I was at sea for about half the term, but then everything started falling together, and I came out all right. So that met my requirement for CCNY, and I got in there and finished my education there.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ed, during the wartime period, what was shopping like in Oak Ridge and what did you have to do to serve your needs. Of course, you were single, you didn’t need a lot of stuff, but where did you eat, by the way? Did you eat at the cafeterias too?
Mr. Fairstein: I ate at the cafeterias. And I thought –
Mr. Kolb: Like all the other singles did.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. Well, everybody who didn’t live in permanent housing ate in the cafeterias. And I thought the food was pretty good.
Mr. Kolb: Which one did you eat at? Was it the one down in Jefferson Circle?
Mr. Fairstein: I ate at two. There was one near Jackson Square.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, the T&C? The T&C, it was called later. When I came here in ’54, I ate at the T&C, right below Jackson Square, right on Tennessee Avenue.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, that must have been it. I’ve forgotten some of the details, but I know I did eat there, and I also ate at the Jefferson Cafeteria, for no particular reason, just for some variety, but actually the food was pretty much the same. A lot of the people didn’t think the cafeteria’s very good, and there was this joke that was going around at one time that one of the guards found somebody rooting in a garbage can outside of the cafeteria, and he called him out and he says, “You’ve gotta eat in the cafeteria. You’re no better than the rest of us.” There was another incident that stands out in my mind. They hired somebody – of course there was a fair amount of cheating, which is universal, I suppose. Cafeteria workers would take the best food away, you know, to sell it in private shops somewhere else.
Mr. Kolb: Really?
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yeah, there was a big scandal at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in their cafeteria, the head of that cafeteria was doing that. And, of course, they fired him. I don’t know whether he went to jail or not.
Mr. Kolb: You mean he carried the food out of X-10 and brought it into town, or what?
Mr. Fairstein: He would divert the shipments that were coming in to a private restaurant, and the dregs would come into the official cafeteria.
Mr. Kolb: Well you could make a lot of money on the side.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yeah, right.
Mr. Kolb: Pretty ingenious. I never even thought about that.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, anyway, this one person who headed up one of the cafeterias, it may have been the Jackson, the one near Jackson Square, he would have them prepare a steak for him. They had steak, but it wasn’t done as nicely as his. You know, a regular meal that you would get in a high class restaurant. And he would trot this out and sit at one of the tables over at the end of the aisle, where you had to pass him as you went up to the counter to get your own food, and calmly eat away. He was rubbing it into the people, because you couldn’t get the food that he was eating. He was a nut. He was not a very popular man at the time, and I don’t remember what eventually happened to him, but he didn’t last very long. Somebody must have really complained about that.
Mr. Kolb: Did Roscoe Stevens have his restaurant in Grove Center then, the Oak Terrace, it was called later?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. That’s right. The Oak Terrace was a nice place. I used to eat there. The food was good.
Mr. Kolb: Roscoe Stevens was the manager?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, and there was more variety. Well, you could choose what you wanted to eat if you went to the Oak Terrace.
Mr. Kolb: Right, that was a restaurant, not a cafeteria.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. It was a regular restaurant.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve been told that there were lines for this, that, and the other. You saw something, you got in line just in case you needed something you needed to be in line for whatever.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, there were big lines. It was a straight cafeteria, you went through the line –
Mr. Kolb: No, I’m talking about other things besides food.
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, for other things? There was very little in the way of shopping. There were a few drug stores. I remember there was Jim McMahon’s drugstore in Jackson Square, and that’s still there. That was one of the early ones. And then there was a drug store – each of the shopping centers had a drugstore.
Mr. Kolb: And then Miller’s was up in Townsite.
Mr. Fairstein: But that was afterwards. When we first started, there was practically nothing. There was a small tailor’s shop where you could get clothes mended and all, and he charged a fortune, because he had a monopoly.
Mr. Kolb: But he got some competition probably later on, eventually.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, yes. I mean, when the town [was] opening up, stores started developing, and for hotels and motels, there really wasn’t much. Early on there was the Diplomat and there was the Alexander, and that was about it. But now, we’ve got a plethora of motels and hotels.
Mr. Kolb: Well did you ever go to Clinton or Knoxville to shop, for example?
Mr. Fairstein: You were forced to in the early days, and we were not welcome. Oak Ridgers were not welcome in Clinton or in Knoxville, because, for one thing, we stood out. We didn’t have southern accents because most of us came from other parts of the country, so immediately they’d spot us that way, and also I guess they didn’t like the way we behaved. People from the big city behave differently from people who come from a small town.
Mr. Kolb: Do you think there was any jealousy involved? You were making better money than they were making?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t think that was it.
Mr. Kolb: Just different society.
Mr. Fairstein: We were different and we were disliked just for being different. We didn’t fit into the small southern town style. I will make a remark about –
Mr. Kolb: Well, were there any exceptions to that? Did everyone treat you the same way in terms of –
Mr. Fairstein: I can’t recall any exceptions.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I just wondered.
Mr. Fairstein: We were tolerated. We weren’t welcome. And at some places they made it plain, they didn’t want you around.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve heard that before. I’ve heard it the other way too, but people are different, yeah. Okay, Oak Ridge is a secret city. It didn’t exist on the map. People disappeared into this vacuum. And inside this city was security, security, security, heavy emphasis. How did this affect you in your work during World War II days? I mean, did you get the message it was bad – maybe you didn’t know what to talk about, you didn’t know what the process was that you were working on or why you were working on it.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, the technical people caught on early on. They didn’t really have to be told. They could just see the kinds of material they were handling and most of them had read technical journals before they ever came out here.
Mr. Kolb: So they guessed, you think they guessed there was an atomic bomb involved?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t know. I don’t think it was actually a bomb. They knew something big was going on, and they knew it involved the transuranic elements and uranium, but they didn’t know in detail. We didn’t really find that out until after the bomb was dropped, officially find that out.
Mr. Kolb: But did you speculate on that yourself?
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yeah, and like I say, I knew about the Manhattan Project before I ever came down here because one of my friends –
Mr. Kolb: Professor, yeah.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. But I didn’t know the details, and like I say, I figured out partly what was going on. We didn’t talk among ourselves about things that were supposed to be secure. We were very pessimistic about how good the security actually was. Well, there’s a basic conflict. In the scientific community, there’s cooperation and you share your technical information with whoever else is working on a thing. Now, in this environment, you couldn’t do that. And we didn’t believe it was going to be effective. And, of course, eventually we were proven right because Klaus Fuchs from Los Alamos gave away the store. I mean, he really gave the Russians all of what they needed to build their own atomic weapons. So I think on the whole that the security did more damage than it did help, and in various ways. For example, at Y-12, the people in charge, the superintendents, even if they knew what was going on, they were not allowed to tell any of the other workers. And shortly after I went to Y-12, I understand that somebody dragged some contamination into the offices, and they had to just trash, I mean, take all of the offices, dismantle and bury this stuff.
Mr. Kolb: Papers and everything?
Mr. Fairstein: Well, I don’t know about the papers, but certainly all of the furniture, because it all got contaminated. And Richard Feynman, you know, the physicist, he was sent to Y-12 to help with the process or to evaluate what was going on and all, and he was walking around, he noticed that there was a large store of uranium on the floor in one of the laboratories, and then a thin wall on the other side was office area –
Mr. Kolb: Just normal uranium? Not enriched uranium, of course.
Mr. Fairstein: I think it was normal uranium, but there may have been partial enrichment, I’m not sure. And he mentioned it to the supervisor there, and he says, “Oh, we can’t tell anybody about this.” But he pointed out that the people on the other side of the wall were getting exposed to radiation, you know, and it was actually dangerous. And I understand there were other places where there was real danger of getting critical mass together because the people weren’t told, you know, if you’re gonna store this stuff, keep it in small pieces and keep it segregated. Feynman was a great guy. He raised a big stink about that, and then you remember during one of the launches where the thing exploded and a number of people – and a school teacher who was on there, she got killed? Well it turned out that the reason that thing blew up was because they had the launch when the temperature was too low, and the O-rings became brittle, and the people who were working on the thing told them, the technical people, says, “Don’t launch; it’s too cold. I mean, there’s real danger here.” And the brass would refuse to listen to them.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my.
Mr. Fairstein: And in the hearings afterwards, Feynman gave a demonstration. He took one of the O-rings, which was very flexible, and he dipped it in ice water, took it out, it was hard and brittle, and he cracked it. And he wrote a report. His part of the report found the administration at fault, and they refused to include that thing in the report, and he wrote a separate one as an addendum. Well that’s the sort of a guy he was. He would pick out dangerous parts, and he wasn’t afraid to talk about them.
Mr. Kolb: Now, was he here as a consultant, like?
Mr. Fairstein: He was just here as a consultant. He was only here for a month or so.
Mr. Kolb: Was he from New York?
Mr. Fairstein: Originally? Yes, he was. As a matter of fact, he and I are sort of contemporaries. We both grew up in Brooklyn, and we both played with radios and repaired radios with pin money when we were [boys].
Mr. Kolb: Oh, did you know each other?
Mr. Fairstein: No, I never knew anything about him until after, long after, you know, when I read his biography.
Mr. Kolb: Going back to the security aspect, were you aware that there were spies in town, that some of the people were actually spies? They were paid to listen and report if they heard anything.
Mr. Fairstein: If there were any, I didn’t know any of them. I never knew anybody that I had the least suspicion about.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, you weren’t aware of that.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, I was aware of security.
Mr. Kolb: No, I mean, you weren’t aware of these –
Mr. Fairstein: I wasn’t aware of anybody who was actually doing any spying.
Mr. Kolb: If there were.
Mr. Fairstein: If there were, and I don’t know that there were.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, we’ll talk about that later, but you weren’t aware of that. But you just saw the signs, and hush-hush, and that sort of thing.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, and you did have to wear your badge everywhere.
Mr. Kolb: So, you know, we’ve been told that people didn’t know that worked at K-25 what was going on in Y-12 or X-10 and vice versa. Was that true for you too? Of course, you worked at X-10 and Y-12, so you knew what was going on.
Mr. Fairstein: I knew what those two were and I knew about the gaseous diffusion project at K-25.
Mr. Kolb: How did you find out about that?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t remember.
Mr. Kolb: Just through talking with people? I mean you knew people that there was an area out there, where there was work going on.
Mr. Fairstein: No, I do know, I do have more reason to know about that. I told you there was an observation station – oh, that reminds me of the airplanes they used around here. I’ll get back to that. There was an observation place out near K-25 up on top of the hill, and when I was still on the guard force, they sent me out there one time to just – somebody had to be there every night and people took turns. And so one night they sent me out there, and we had a jeep that I could drive out there. And the road, that was kind of frightening, this very narrow road to get up there, and there was a dirt road and it was close to the edge and it slanted outwards, not very good shape. Anyway, when I got up there, I recall the place had hornets in it. And there were lots of them. They were buzzing all over the ceiling and everything, but I was never really afraid of insects, and I decided if I would leave them alone, they’ll leave me alone, which is the way it worked out. So I went to sleep with them buzzing around, but I didn’t get stung or anything.
Mr. Kolb: Hope they went to sleep too.
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but you knew that was out there then.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, and as a result of that, I had to pass the K-25 area, and I saw this monstrous building. I had no idea of the details of what was going on. I think I’d heard the term gaseous diffusion and knew roughly what the process was, but certainly none of the details.
Mr. Kolb: But see, some people didn’t even know about other plants. They just were isolated, because you didn’t talk about what was going on, so you just didn��t know, until later, of course.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. And there were gates, like there was a security gate not far from Montana Avenue. And if you were going to K-25, you had to check through that gate. So if you had no business in K-25, you couldn’t get in there.
Mr. Kolb: You couldn’t get beyond that point, right, exactly, and the same for Y-12, I guess.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. Every one of the areas had its own security gate, and you had to have a badge to get through, and they would check them. Of course, the security of the town, in one sense, was a blessing. There was no robbery in town. Nobody bothered locking their doors in their houses, and you didn’t have to worry about that sort of thing.
Mr. Kolb: Gate around everything and patrols.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: So parents felt that children were safe and sort of turned them loose.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, that’s right. Now, I started talking about the airplanes. The area was patrolled for prowlers, and there was a horse patrol. They simply wandered – they were guard force people, and they wandered all over the area on their horses, back over away from the roads and all, and there were two small planes. There was a Piper Cub and a small Aranca that patrolled the area too, simply looking for people that were walking around out in the woods where they shouldn’t be. And I made friends with the guy who owned the Aranca, because he would check in occasionally at our guard house while I was still working for the guard force and doing the radio repairs. And he would occasionally have some work that needed to be done on the electronics in his plane, and I would help him with that, and he took me up a couple of times. And that was interesting.
Mr. Kolb: Just to be able to see the area would be probably pretty exciting.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, that was fascinating. And he had an RCA radio transmitter in his plane that was installed afterwards, and it worked very poorly, because the antenna would not load up properly. I’m using jargon, but you couldn’t get the antenna to transmit, so he asked me to rebuild that thing for him. Well, with my ham radio experience, that was easy to do, and I literally rebuilt it, and I also doubled up on the amplitude, because he wanted more power.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so you got more range out of it?
Mr. Fairstein: Right, and for testing, he was on the ground one day, the first time we put the thing together, he called over to the McGhee – what was then – I don’t know if they called it the McGhee Tyson, yes, I guess it was still McGhee Tyson Airport, over in Maryville.
Mr. Kolb: Well, it’s still there now, but he called there then.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. So he called over there while he was on the ground and asked if they were picking him up and they says, “Yeah, you’re coming in loud and clear. Where are you?” And he told them and they couldn’t believe it. First thing, even if you were airborne from Oak Ridge, they weren’t sure he’d have enough power to get over there. And the fact that he was on the ground, and he still had power enough to get over there. So he was delighted with the fix I gave him.
Mr. Kolb: Where did these planes operate out of? Where did they land?
Mr. Fairstein: There was a small airfield over where the security gate for Montana, near where Montana Avenue is.
Mr. Kolb: Out here in the west end?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, over on the other side of the highway.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Was it paved?
Mr. Fairstein: Well, they put in a small paved – I don’t remember whether it was paved or not, but it was certainly smoothed down. I mean, it was adequate for a landing strip. They had two planes there.
Mr. Kolb: So it was inside the facility, inside the plant area.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, and they put up a shed to keep the planes under, and we just tied them down there.
Mr. Kolb: Were these Army personnel who did the flying?
Mr. Fairstein: No, they weren’t. They were civilians, and they hired them. But, of course they had to – security was pretty strict. They had their badges too.
Mr. Kolb: I never knew about that. That’s interesting.
[Tape 2, Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Ed, you’ve got some more security information?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, one little bit. We were talking about the small planes patrolling the area. There on the hill, or the ridge, between Y-12 and Oak Ridge proper, there was a reservoir up there. And there was also an anti-aircraft installation up there. That stayed there for many years. Of course, nobody’s talked about that, but most of the people in town knew the thing was there. And, of course, planes were not allowed to fly over the area, and they really still are not. You mentioned something about there being an incident in 1956? I just vaguely remember that, of a plane flying over, and I don’t remember the circumstances.
Mr. Kolb: Well, one time, a plane landed by accident on a main street. I think it was something like that. The plane had to put down; it was an emergency.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And, you know, he just didn’t have any choice. But he got out of here as fast as he could. But that was an unusual situation. I’m gonna switch subjects here a little bit. This was a dry area, initially, for a long time. How did you locals cope during World War II with the need or the want, to get – now beer was available – how did you get your liquor? Tell me about how that worked. I don’t know whether you imbibed or not, but just whatever you know about it.
Mr. Fairstein: Well, Oakdale in Morgan County, Morgan County was wet apparently, and there was a small liquor store up at Oakdale, and the Oak Ridgers found out about that and they’d go up there to get their liquor. Now this was kind of tricky, because ordinarily they would search you when you came into the gates. I mean, Oak Ridge was still locked up, so it was difficult, and people did manage to bring it in. Now, there were some access roads. What is now Key Springs Road used to be called “G Road,” and that was not patrolled. And those of us –
Mr. Kolb: It was not patrolled?
Mr. Fairstein: No.
Mr. Kolb: You could come up there without going through a guard?
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Well, what an obvious leak in the system.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, but I don’t know how come they missed it, you know. And I think there were a couple of other roads in the Oak Ridge area that were in the same circumstance. It was a very narrow road, and I think it was a dirt road at the time, but I’m not sure. Very few people knew about it, you see, so I guess that’s one of the reasons they didn’t bother patrolling it.
Mr. Kolb: I see, but it��s an evacuation route, wasn’t it? Later on, maybe.
Mr. Fairstein: A little later on it became an evacuation route. I’ve got some words to say about that too. You need to remind me.
Mr. Kolb: So you could just drive right off that road if you wanted to –
Mr. Fairstein: Well, it wasn’t very good for cars, but those of us who had motorcycles, and we found out about that, and so when we’d visit Oakdale, we’d bring some liquor back with us, saddlebags.
Mr. Kolb: You had a lot of friends that you helped out.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. You know, I mentioned that I made friends with a motorcyclist while I was working for the guard force, and this was how I found out about it. I don’t know how he found out about it. He just explored, I guess. Anyway, the Oakdale people knew what the situation was, so you couldn’t just buy a bottle of good bourbon, you had to buy some other stuff that they forced on you too. Mostly it was liqueurs and junky stuff that they couldn’t sell to anybody else. They wanted to get rid of them, see. So if you wanted to buy a bottle of good whiskey, you also had to buy some of this other stuff too, which was all right, I suppose. Then later on Knox County became wet, and I don’t remember exactly what the details were.
Mr. Kolb: But that was a lot later, right?
Mr. Fairstein: That was a lot later, that’s right. I think that the administration in Nashville decided that the five largest cities in Tennessee could go wet if they chose to go wet, and Knoxville was one of them, so it went wet, and there was a liquor store that became very popular. It was the first one you came to as you went in on Highway 62, I believe it was, and so we bought our liquor there.
Mr. Kolb: What about bootleggers? Were they in the area?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes. Bootleggers were in the area, lots of bootleggers. You could always get whiskey here, but you had to buy it from the bootleggers.
Mr. Kolb: But they had to get through the guard gates too? Or did they come up G Road too?
Mr. Fairstein: No, I think this was afterwards. I really don’t know what the bootlegging situation was as long as we had the gates here. I never tried to buy from them, and I don’t know of anybody else who did. I’m sure there were bootleggers, but I just didn’t know anything about them.
Mr. Kolb: Or you went outside, you could buy it and try to bring it in if you did it, something like that.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. Now, Oak Ridge became wet because we got a sheriff who was reasonably honest. And, incidentally, the political situation was pretty interesting. I guess it was mostly Republican. The center of the political scene was in Clinton, and they were all old timers and had a very close knit community, and you went along with them or you didn’t get what you wanted. Very early on, there were some restaurants that would serve beer, but they paid off the sheriff, which was the only way they could do it. There was always a strong political group in Oak Ridge, and they managed to take over the Clinton situation and we got some honest people in there. One of the sheriffs got fed up with this business of the payoffs, and he clamped down on all of the bootleggers, and I understand that he did this deliberately. That dried up the supply of liquor to Oak Ridge, at which point there was a referendum, and we went wet, and from that day on, we’ve had liquor stores in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Put the squeeze on the supply and that did it.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. And, of course, as soon as liquor stores did become legal, immediately, people wanted to start liquor stores and there was more than the town could handle. I don’t quite remember how they handled that, but eventually we got a reasonable number.
Mr. Kolb: Well I’ve been told that the G.I.s were not searched, so they became very popular sources.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay, I didn’t know about that.
Mr. Kolb: They had big coats and pockets, you know.
Mr. Fairstein: Now, I know that at the security gates and the one at Y-12, which I had to go through all the time to go to work when I finally got my own transportation, they were supposed to stop and search everything, including the trunks of the cars. One of the people decided they were just going to play a trick on them, because they got kind of lax at that. She was a bus driver, as I recall, the woman who instigated this. She must have been a bus driver that went through the gates, for a while there, when they did switch over to a formal bus transportation system. She and her buddy decided that they were going to play a prank on the people at the guard gate. And I remember what it is now, they recognized her, see, so they wouldn’t stop her or anything, they’d just let her on through. So one day, she came through and she had a friend tucked in at the trunk. He was in the trunk. And she was just playing a gag, see, so she went through the gate and she stopped on the outside and she yelled at the guards and she opened the trunk and her friend jumps out. They didn’t take kindly to that and she got in real trouble over that.
Mr. Kolb: She never got through again without being searched either.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Did she keep her job?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, I think she kept her job, but she couldn’t pull any pranks like that anymore.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s funny. There was all kinds of stuff going on that bends the rules. Back to a little bit more conventional topic. When the war was going on, you were single, of course, but did you participate in any war effort activities like buying bonds? Of course, you didn’t probably have a victory garden. Did you collect aluminum foil and that sort of stuff?
Mr. Fairstein: No, I didn’t do any of that, but I think I did buy some government bonds, partly through patriotism and partly to make some money on the interest.
Mr. Kolb: Right, good safe investment kind of thing.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well, Ed, tell us what happened and how you reacted when the first A-bomb dropped in August of ’45. Where were you and what do you remember about that whole exciting incident?
Mr. Fairstein: I keep thinking that I was in the old chemistry building at X-10, but that can’t be right, because I didn’t go to X-10 until 1946, so it must have been Y-12. Of course, we heard about the bomb.
Mr. Kolb: How did you hear about it? Was it broadcast?
Mr. Fairstein: Broadcast.
Mr. Kolb: On the PA system or word of mouth?
Mr. Fairstein: The very first announcement, I don’t know, it must have been word of mouth, but immediately, everybody at Y-12 seemed to know about it, you know, and all work was dropped and everybody was talking about it and was delighted to find out that this had happened and all. And then the next few days, of course, were just pure excitement.
Mr. Kolb: Did you go back to work after that?
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, as I recall, we didn’t have any holidays. We just continued working. Of course, there wasn’t an awful lot of work done because people would be sitting around talking about it. I recall, I haven’t spoken to anybody who remembers this particular incident, but I seem to remember it pretty clearly, that the News Sentinel had an extra for this, and in their excitement, as I recall, they got their headline somehow all scrambled up. It said “Knoxville Sentinel View News.”
Mr. Kolb: The name of the paper was wrong.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, you know, whoever was setting the type up just accidentally messed it up. And I’m sorry I didn’t save that paper, and there’s a possibility I’m dreaming it, but I don’t think so. It���s so clear in my mind, but I never heard anybody else refer to that. But, of course, the front page was solid black in the largest letters they could find announcing the end of the war.
Mr. Kolb: Well that was before the war ended. It was the first bomb drop.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, the first bomb, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Took another week before the war ended.
Mr. Fairstein: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But wasn’t there a lot of partying going on or that sort of thing?
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t recall. There must have been, but I just don’t remember. I was still living in the dorms, you see, at the time. I just don’t recall that part of it, sorry.
Mr. Kolb: Ed Westcott took the famous picture of Townsite, full of people, holding up that paper. Well, no that was “War Ends,” I’m sorry. That was a little different. What about the time when another big event, of course, was the opening of the gates in ’49, when the security gates were taken down and what about that time? Do you remember anything about that?
Mr. Fairstein: I remember very little about that. I mean, of course, everyone was happy that the gates were now permanently opened.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, were they? I understood there was a referendum taken and it was voted against initially. That’s what we’ve been told, and I think that’s a matter of record, that people didn’t want to lose their security, that they liked this secure feeling.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, that does come back to me, but it didn’t hold. I mean, the gates were opened. And, let’s see, Helen and I – I don’t remember exactly when they opened but –
Mr. Kolb: You were married in forty –
Mr. Fairstein: We were married in ’49.
Mr. Kolb: Well that was the year that they opened.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay, but anyway –
Mr. Kolb: You were so excited about getting married, you just –
Mr. Fairstein: Right. But anyway, we would, you know, we were so used to showing our badge when we got to the gate, every once in a while we’d come into the gate, and I’d tell Helen, “Where’s your badge?” and she’d start scrabbling in her handbag and then come to realize I was kidding her. But it took a long time to get over that habit. But I don’t remember any other incidents that were really tied into the gate opening, except for what you just reminded me of.
Mr. Kolb: Well there was a big parade. They brought in bigwigs.
Mr. Fairstein: I don’t remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well are there any other unique experiences that you might want to volunteer just in general, things that come to mind about happenings that you experienced and people you might have experienced them with, offhand?
Mr. Fairstein: No, I don’t, really. I think I’ve told you about as much as I can recall.
Mr. Kolb: Well, what, in your opinion, has made Oak Ridge an unusual community. You’ve lived here a long time, since ’44.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes, and I’ve seen lots of changes.
Mr. Kolb: That’s going on sixty, fifty-eight years.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. When we first started being allowed to have our own cars in town and started driving around, there were inspections. Your cars had to be safe to drive, and there were inspection stations. You had check in, I think it was every six months or so, to make sure that your brakes worked properly and all of your lights were functioning properly, and they all had to be adjusted properly. And I guess a lot of people complained about that, because they eventually quit doing it, but I think that was a terrible mistake.
Mr. Kolb: Now, this was done by the state requirement?
Mr. Fairstein: It was done by the state. No, I’m not sure; I really don’t know whether it was just an Oak Ridge phenomenon or whether it was a state thing. I’m more inclined to think it was an Oak Ridge phenomenon.
Mr. Kolb: During the war or after? You didn’t have a car during the war. You said you had a motorcycle.
Mr. Fairstein: No, I got my first car in ’46 or so. I’d been driving a motorcycle before that. So, again, I don’t recall whether that was a state requirement or a local city requirement. I think it was very good, but people didn’t like it of course.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, a hassle kind of a thing, you know.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right. Now, when you’re talking about changes in Oak Ridge, for several years after the war – well, we were known as Science City and we were sort of like Los Alamos. The flavor of Oak Ridge, I think, was different from Los Alamos and was different from Berkeley, but still we were a very cosmopolitan city for quite a while. Clearly different from the surrounding communities. I have seen that gradually disappear. I think we are much more now a sleepy southern town than we used to be. It used to be that there were good drivers in town, because people who drove here drove like New York, I mean, they weren’t as wild as New York, but they had the same sense. Like a New York driver, if you see somebody coming towards you who has to be diverted into your lane because there’s some obstruction or something, they didn’t think about it. They just automatically pulled over to make room for him. And you would make room for people to pull into your lane when traffic would be tight and all, and it used to be like that in Oak Ridge. Not anymore. People use the inside lane, which is supposed to be the passing lane, as a cruising lane, except if all the traffic happens to be in the outside lane. Then if you’re in the side street and you want to pull in, nobody will pull over for you. It didn’t used to be like that. People were a lot more polite in their driving.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. We’ve got a lot more traffic than we ever had, too.
Mr. Fairstein: Yes we do, and I think it is terribly managed. A couple of years ago, or maybe about a year and a half ago, they increased the dwell time of the light cycle, which is terrible, because during rush hour, between two lights, it can become completely filled with cars, and people from the side streets can’t pull in. There is a progressive light system on the Turnpike, but the Turnpike speed is thirty-five miles an hour, the official speed, but the lights are set for fifty miles an hour.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Mr. Fairstein: Oh, yes. And it switches – this is hysterical – our first city manager, I can’t recall his name, under Bissell, he was the best one we ever had. I think he was probably responsible for the first progressive light system. And that one worked out well. The lights would favor eastbound traffic at the end of the day, when the people were coming home from the plants, and westbound traffic early in the day when people were going to the plants. And the dwell time was reasonable, and it worked out very well. But then, when he was no longer – the following city managers made the system worse and worse. Every time anybody has messed with the traffic lights, they’ve made it worse. When Illinois Avenue was put in, that never had a progressive light system, and they randomly get out of sequence, so that there are times when you’re going along Illinois Avenue, you catch a red light at every single red light, so the average speed has got to be around ten miles an hour, and the administration doesn’t understand that this not only wastes gas, but it cuts down on travel time. And, again, they have increased the dwell time, which is pretty bad, because it’s just too long.
Mr. Kolb: Definitely the traffic system’s gotten worse. Of course, it started off pretty bad because you didn’t have cars, and now it’s gotten back to too much traffic to deal with.
Mr. Fairstein: That’s right, and for a while there, we used to have blinking, after eight o’clock at night, when there was very little traffic on the Turnpike, they’d switch over to a blinking light system.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they started that again on some lights.
Mr. Fairstein: It’s very recently because I haven’t encountered it.
Mr. Kolb: Just fairly recently, yeah, it’s certain lights, not all of them, but certain lights.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay, well, it should be done as a matter of course on the Turnpike.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I think it’s maybe experimental now, but they were trying it out, as I understand, but anything else? Well there was huge changes, obviously, in Oak Ridge, but I don’t want to get started on everything, because –
Mr. Fairstein: I think it’s going downhill.
Mr. Kolb: Well, what about the attitudes of the more recent Oak Ridgers, compared with the earlier original Oak Ridgers. Do you think there’s still the – well, it couldn’t be nothing like the excitement of World War II, of course. We don’t want to go through that again, I guess.
Mr. Fairstein: Right. Oh, I can’t tell much. Like I say, a lot of the people in Oak Ridge are still very cosmopolitan, but that’s because, I think largely because the surrounding communities are growing up. Like Knoxville used to be a terrible place to live, but now it’s a big city, and really a very nice city.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it’s gotten a lot better. You’re getting a lot of integration of all different cultures. Mobility is now the thing. In the forties that was just beginning. Because of World War II, people’s eyes were opened.
Mr. Fairstein: Of course, after the war, you remember, we were talking about that store, [the attitude] of Knoxvillians towards Oak Ridgers. That really all disappeared after the war when there started to be a lot more mixing and the Knoxville people found that we were a good source of revenue because we spent a lot of money.
Mr. Kolb: That’s true, yeah. Well, okay, that’s fine.
Mr. Fairstein: And then one other thing, I just thought of it. It used to be that Knoxville was a shopping center for everything from the Cumberland Plateau east, you know, from Rockford and so on east. Oak Ridge has become the shopping center of this area. Well, it shares it with Knoxville. People who live in Knoxville don’t come to Oak Ridge to buy, but there’s much less people from Oak Ridge going into Knoxville to buy because we’ve got so many facilities and stores now that we didn’t used to have.
Mr. Kolb: That’s true. We started out pretty slow, and it’s improved. Could get better, still, but that’s another story. Okay, Ed, well, listen, this has been very interesting and I really thank you for your insightful comments and you’ve had a wonderful career, a long career. You’re still active and that’s great. We’ll just sign off, so this is the –
Mr. Fairstein: Well, let me make one remark.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, go ahead.
Mr. Fairstein: I’ve enjoyed this interview. You’re a great Mr. Kolb, and you made it easy. Thank you.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I’m still learning, that’s for sure. Thank you, Ed.
Mr. Fairstein: You’re welcome.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Ed, we’re going to have you add an addendum here, something you brought up, okay.
Mr. Fairstein: Okay. While I was still working for the guard force, I got to really missing classical music, because there were no radio stations down here at the time that played classical music. And in New York, there were several. In particular there was WQXR, which is, I suppose, is a famous station, at least among people who are interested in good music. So I decided I would build me a radio to pick up WQXR.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, tuned to that frequency only?
Mr. Fairstein: No, it was just a general purpose radio. But, you know, I told you that I had a background and I was always interested in electronics, and I was a ham radio operator and I built all of my own equipment, so it was no big thing for me. So while I was working in this garage, I started collecting parts that I would need for this. And somebody made the chassis for me; it was roughly ten inches by twelve inches and about three inches high, out of sheet metal. I think one of the government agencies just made it on the side for me, and I had what are called socket punchers, to punch out holes for the tubes and so on, just ordinary tools for the rest of it, and some of the electronic parts I was able to buy, and some were tubes that were used for repairs of the radio equipment. Anyway, I built this radio during breaks on the job.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, at work.
Mr. Fairstein: At work, right, because we’d have breaks. You know, there were times when there was nothing to do, and if there was nothing to do, I would pick up on this thing, and I guess it took me about a month or so. I finally put this thing together, and it was a little bit more than you’d find in an ordinary radio, because I knew it had to be good to be able to pick up New York.
Mr. Kolb: And this was A.M., too.
Mr. Fairstein: This was A.M. And it worked, and I was able to pick up WQXR, and I started playing my classical music at work, much to the annoyance of some of the people who didn’t like that kind of music. But then I had a defender. One of the old timers was so impressed that somebody could build a radio from scratch, you know, and make it work, that this man needs to be forgiven, no matter what he does. So he was my defender. Well, anyway, eventually I took the radio to my dormitory and set it up there, and I was able to get a couple of good speakers, so I enjoyed my music in the dorm. Somebody, one of the other dorm residents, noticed this, and he became very suspicious, and he spoke to the authorities, because he was afraid I was a spy.
Mr. Kolb: He thought you were using the radio to transmit.
Mr. Fairstein: Right, see, so this is the incident that you were talking about, the monitors. So somebody from security came to visit me in the dormitory and I welcomed him, you know, and he wanted to know about that radio, so I gave him the circumstances, and he says, “Can it be used? Can you make a transmitter out of that?” So I says, “Well anybody who knows electronics can take any radio whatsoever and convert it to a transmitter if he wants to, but this one hasn’t been converted. It can’t transmit, and I’m not about to.” So I think the guy went away kind of suspicious, but he did go away and I never heard any more about it.
Mr. Kolb: You don’t know whether he put a tail on you or not.
Mr. Fairstein: I have no idea, and it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t attempting to break security.
Mr. Kolb: You told him the truth and that was that.
Mr. Fairstein: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Well you got some good reverberations out of that from your friend at least. You found out who liked classical music.
Mr. Fairstein: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good.
[end of recording]